


in a yellow wood

by queserafina



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Character Death, Character Study, F/M, Human Experimentation, M/M, Not Really Character Death, Suicide, Suicide Attempt, i guess?, my friend says that one's a mindfuck, not him, spot the ulysses reference
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-05
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 12:22:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1744466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/queserafina/pseuds/queserafina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His name is John. This is important.<br/>(This is a story of how Khan is made.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

His name is John.

This is important. Nobody else is called John that he knows. There is David, and Martin, and James, and Kate, and Harley, and him, John. There are doctors who are all called Doctor and then strange things after, and that is how he knows that your name decides who you are. There are instructors, who teach them how to calculate infinitesimal limits, and also how to snap tendons and break bone. There are the omnipresent wardens. There are the Other Kids who are bigger than them, and the Other Kids who are smaller than them, and they do not mingle despite the wardens’ encouragement thereof. John does not know their names and therefore what they do and that makes him nervous.

And then there are the Misters, who are tall, and walk through the halls carrying their influence in a great dark coat around their bodies, making everyone else scuttle before and after them, who seem solely interested in the kids. Sometimes they look into doctor meetings, or watch their instructor meetings, or inspect their rooms accompanied by wardens. Sometimes the only trace of their presence is the fact that their warden for the day has been replaced and every adult seems more tense and quiet. Sometimes they order the kids to be sent into a room with them, one by one, and shut all the wardens outside the door. The wardens never like that.

John has never seen a Mister twice. So he isn’t fazed when the door shuts behind him and he turns around to see an unfamiliar face peering down at him. He’s wearing a dark suit, like all Misters.

‘Hello, John. I’m Mister Haffley.’

‘Hello, Mister Haffley.’

‘How are you doing?’

‘Fine, Mister Haffley.’ John doesn’t understand why calling a person’s name over and over is supposed to be polite, but he does as the wardens have told him, as he does what every adult tells him.

‘How are your lessons? You’re the fastest in your class, why is that?’

‘I like my lessons, Mister Haffley.’

‘Really? Is there a reason why you bit your self-defence instructor?’

John goes blank. That was a very messy incident that led to other instructors and wardens being called down and he’d ended up losing his socialisation privileges for a week. He didn’t talk much usually, so it was no great loss.

‘Well?’

The wardens never told him what to say about that, so he blurts out the truth. ‘I bit Instructor Tomke because he hit Harley.’

‘Hmm. Harley is your classmate, yes?’

‘Yes, Mister Haffley.’

‘And you like her?’

John again goes blank. ‘N-no, Mister Haffley, I-I mean, yes, uh –’

‘S’alright, son.’ John is confused because son is not his name. ‘So why _did_ you bite Instructor Tomke for, mm, her?’

‘… Because she’s my classmate, Mister Haffley?’

‘Stop with the Mister Haffley, it’s getting annoying,’ Mister Haffley suddenly snaps. John is becoming increasingly unsettled. ‘Well then. How do you get along with your classmates then, son?’

‘I get along fine, M-.’ John cuts himself off in time.

‘Great. Great. Just great. I have to tell you, son, you and your friends are doing some very important work and it’s absolutely critical that you put in your very best. You’re cut out for great things, son. You understand that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Great. Well, run along, Don.’

John leaves the room and shuts the door behind him, just a little bit harder than he has to, because apparently important wasn’t important enough to get his name right, and what could be more important than that?

*

‘I don’t like them,’ Harley declares, tugging at her recently-cut hair. John knows she hates when they cut her hair down to regulation length because it irritates the back of her neck. He knows that Kate gets to keep her hair long because she volunteers for extra-credit projects with the doctors. He knows that David has a half-friend two years up whom he talks to because they look like photographs of the same blond-haired blue-eyed person two years apart. He knows that Martin sprained his knee in solidarity with James breaking his leg.

He knows that he is scoring better in his training than the two Twelves who are four years older than him. He knows his friends are sticking with him because there are no Thirteens.

‘Get ‘em to cut it shorter, like a boy’s,’ Martin says through a mouthful of apple.

‘Not that!’ Harley snaps in reply. ‘I’m used to that.’ She flips up her shirt collar to cover the back of her neck. ‘ _Them_.’

‘The misters?’ James looks up from his storybook, called _Moby Dick_. John thinks if he spent more time reading his textbooks instead of his storybooks, he’d do better.

‘Yes.’ Harley lowers her voice some more. ‘They’re creepy. And they make everyone unhappy.’

Everyone murmurs assent. John looks over at the omnipotent wardens, scuttling about like frantic ants.

‘Do you think they let you change your name, when you grow up?’

Like a single clockwork toy, everyone stops eating and stares up at him in unison. John stares back at them. It’s a reasonable question.

‘Why?’ David asks, eventually.

‘I want to be a mister, when I grow up. But I’m a John.’

They keep staring at him until Kate snorts and starts sniggering, and then everyone else is sniggering, and John just sits there completely confused, as an uncomfortable hot prickling starts crawling up his skin. He’s never felt that before – well, that’s not true. He felt something similar being interrogated by Mister Haffley. ‘What,’ he snaps.

‘John, mister isn’t their _name_ ,’ Kate tells him. ‘It’s something that they do. You can be called anything and be a mister.’

John looks around, and they’re still laughing at him, so he gets up and dumps his unfinished meal in the trash can and goes to class, fifteen minutes early. He spends fifteen minutes willing the heat rising off his back to go away.

When the rest of them come in to class, he pre-emptively stiffens, but Harley goes right up to him and wraps him in a hug.

‘We’re sorry we laughed at you,’ she murmurs into his shoulder. John looks at the others who are standing, looking at him with nervous, uncertain eyes. He realises that they still need him; that they still don’t know what lies beyond the white walls of their school or why all the dark-suited misters are so interested in them or why they are being taught to smash a man’s skull open or why, most fearful of all, there are none of them that make it to Thirteen. They know that he is still their best chance for answers.

He realises that they are looking up to him. This makes him feel big, and powerful, and strong, and also benevolent, so he puts his arms around Harley and watches everyone relax.

‘It’s okay,’ he says. ‘I forgive you.’ And he does. _His_ friends.

Then the instructor comes in and they start their lesson on Survival in an Urban Environment.

*

David joins them at the beginning of breakfast one day, which is odd, because David usually spends the first ten minutes of breakfast talking to his Eleven half-friend. He’s on edge, so John ignores him entirely and leads everyone in pretending there is nothing more important in the world than their breakfasts, including David.

‘Leonard’s gone,’ David says suddenly.

Everyone stops, again, and stares at John, like a single clockwork –

‘What do you mean,’ Harley asks urgently.

‘He’s gone.’ Leonard is the name of David’s – ‘My twin is missing.’

‘How do you know that?’ John demands to know.

‘I-,’ David is starting to tear up, which is unacceptable. John jumps up, drags him to the toilets, and locks them into a cubicle. He knows he needs to get them out of sight of the wardens as soon as possible.

‘What do you know,’ he snaps at David.

‘He- I couldn’t see him yesterday at lunch so at dinner I tried to ask around and –’ David starts to sob.

‘And _what?_ ’ John pins him to the wall by the shoulders, and for all that it makes David even more terrified, at least it forces him to look at John and answer him.

‘And he was _gone_ ,’ David forces out. ‘Nobody would talk about him, it was like – like he was erased.’ David is shaking, looking up at him with equal parts fear and expectation of guidance. John files the information away for later, then makes a quick decision, bending over the toilet bowl and digging his fingers down his throat. He retches up the little breakfast that he ate.

‘What are you doing?’ David asks, shivering.

‘You were sick,’ John wipes his mouth with toilet paper and drops it into the bowl, just as Warden Hanson kicks the cubicle door open. As expected, he is instantly repelled by the sour smell of sick.

‘What happened?’ Hanson demands of them.

John tries to suppress his heaving and swallow past his burning throat, but David picks up for him. ‘I was sick,’ he says, meekly, using his flushed, tear-stained face to convince Hanson. ‘I think I ate something bad yesterday.’

Hanson takes a long look at both of them. John meets his eyes because he knows that confidence will convince people just as much as a plausible story. John can see when the preference to get out of the tiny, dank, acid-smelling cubicle outweighs Johnson’s ingrained duty to always know what his charges are doing.

‘I’ll take you to the doctor, David.’ He leans over and flushes the bowl, helps David up, and leads him out. John steals a drink of water from the taps to wash out his mouth. When he goes back to the dining hall, he is gratified to see that his classmates have already cleared both his and David’s trays, so nobody can tell what happened. He is, however, also slightly disappointed, as his breakfast had just been flushed down the toilet.

James palms John some apple slices that he makes sure to swallow before the instructor walks in. Because David wisely asked for a glass of water before he was examined, the doctors cannot determine anything definite, and he returns to class in the second period. But if John looks closely, he can still see the shadow of David’s missing twin hanging over him.

*

John wakes up to frantic banging on his door.

He yanks it open to a pale bundle spilling hard into his room. He knows it is Kate without having to make out her features in the gloom, because Harley left 5 weeks ago. She is wearing the exact same set of pyjamas as John. Where Kate used to roll up her sleeves and trouser legs to show off the needle marks and scars on her arm that earned her her extra privileges, now they all have the same arrays of scar tissue, the same traces of healed fractures, the same marks on their lower lumbars administered from different but same doctors, a never-ending carousel of faces wielding a spinning spindle of hypodermic needles. They’ve all gotten used to it; or, they forgot to realise that they didn’t use to do that, in between the muscle-burning physical training and mind-numbing memory exercises, the gradual reduction of unsupervised time, the discouragement from going outside when they had ‘better things to do’. John knows that there is a moon in the sky tonight but he does not know what it looks like. Kate is incoherent at his feet.

John drops to his knees before her. The clock is ticking. The clock started ticking the moment Kate slipped out of her room, and because John cannot account for that time, he needs to be as fast as possible.

‘What is it, Kate, what is it –’

‘They’re taking them away, they’re taking them away –’

‘Who, what, what are you talking about –’

‘They’re – oh god, they’re coming for us too, they’ve got us –’

‘Kate, _pull yourself together_ ,’ John shakes her forcefully, ‘and _tell me what happened_.’

‘They’re – I heard James _screaming_ ,’ Kate’s voice dropped to a whisper, ‘and when I looked out _their doors where open, wide open_ –’

John lets her drop onto the floor and leaps out the door. He only glimpses in passing the three gaping dark rectangular maws that have spit his friends into the night. He runs down the length of the black endless corridor, chasing the glimmers of light and noise at the end. As he gets closer he hears them, his friends, struggling hard and shouting muffled words. He can’t stop now.

He knows he will get to them. He knows he can catch up because he is faster than the wardens already. They all are. He knows he will win because he is barely a quarter the age of his taekwondo instructor and he once broke the man’s wrist just by squeezing. He knows he will best them because he has been taught how to walk quietly, kill quietly, breathe quietly, and he is employing every single one of those skills now. He sneaks from shadow to shadow further and further down the corridor, drawing closer and closer to himself as he approaches them. He stops just outside the door leading to the wardens’ quarters. He hears them –

‘What did mm—’

‘Where is—’

‘—m—arley—’

‘AAAAGH!’ That’s not an Eleven’s voice, that’s a warden’s voice. David has bitten his captor.

‘WHERE’S LEONARD? WHAT DID YOU DO WITH LEONARD, WHAT DID YOU DO WITH HARLEY? WHERE ARE THEY? WHERE –’ a dull metallic clang cuts him off, and Martin and James’ voices soon disappear too. There remains only the laboured breathing of the wardens.

‘How bad is it, eh?’

‘There’s blood, man. There.’

‘Ouch. You might need to get a rabies shot for that, those mad bastards.’

‘Yeah, laugh at my pain, real classy. You know, in the old days they’d just shoot a rabid dog.’

‘Christ, those little buggers don’t give up. You’d think they’d be well-behaved, but all kids are the same, eh? Little horrors.’

‘Too many of ‘em go poking their little sticky noses where they shouldn’t. God, they’re strong. I don’t get paid enough for this shit.’

‘Where do they send them off to? Do you know?’

‘After what they’ve seen, where else do you think? You’d better get that cleaned up.’

‘Anyway, they’re not important. Not individually. It’s the numbers they make up, that’s important.’

‘Speaking of which. Better shut the door, we don’t want to wake up the remaining two. We keep losing them in the upper two years, it’s a real waste.’

The man’s voice gets closer and closer and John suddenly realises, belatedly, that he isn’t supposed to be there. He is so frozen with terror that he doesn’t move at all as the man goes and shuts the door, not seeing him. In the sudden absences of things to hear John notices what seems like a huge river rushing past in the walls, and then, realises that is his own blood sounding in his ears. He stays perfectly still until the lights go off behind the door, then waits another three minutes, then runs without stopping all the way back to his room and locks the door.

Kate is no longer there. The next day there are only two people in class. They obediently swallow the story that David, Martin, and James were transferred to another institution ‘more suited to their developmental needs’, exactly like Harley.

*

John wakes up alone.

That in itself is not unusual. They have always had separate rooms, and when curfew came, would be locked in. Come graduating to Ten, they were given control over their door locks, but most of them, by habit, kept to themselves at night. The night Kate came to his room was an exception.

Tonight is an exception too.

John bolts upright in bed with the cold sinking conviction that he is alone, that on the last night of being Twelve he is now the last of his kind. He knows in his thudding heartbeat that Kate is gone, but his mind doesn’t believe it, so he leaps out of bed and runs across the hall, to Kate’s room, and opens it with the warden’s stolen passcode. He enters it by feel, having rehearsed it endless times since his other friends ‘left’, since he started having nightmares about Kate being attacked in her room.

He yanks the door aside, unheeding of the noise, wishing that the sliding door would slam, even, so that more people can wake up and tend to Kate, who is in danger, who is –

Sleeping soundly and peacefully, curled on her side, in her bed.

The hairs on the back of his neck prickled in warning and the chills down his spine cried out _something’s wrong something’s wrong_ even before he could see it. All the practice he’d undergone training him to notice when the slightest thing was off came down to this, John seeing the blood before seeing it.

The blood –

– was spreading out, slowly, sluggishly, in a womb-shaped pool, from her peeled-open arms, around the curled, cold body of Kate.

John doesn’t remember the rest of the night very clearly. At some point the lights went on, abruptly stabbing their merciless rays into his dilated eyes, lighting up the bed like a garish horror pastiche, making him jerk in surprise and almost tumble off the bed. As he instinctively curled up to protect his eyes he became aware of some kind of odd, shrill, tuneless, shrieking in the room, like a captured rabbit, then he realised that the sound was coming from him, and very soon after that that he couldn’t stop it. They hauled him bodily out of the room as doctors and nurses formed a ghostly huddle around the bed, so the last thing he saw of Kate was his night-vision view of her shadowed body in the near-dark.

When he comes back to himself he is standing in the toilet, looking at a white, pale-eyed, black-haired, clean-suited boy, splattered all over with livid bright blood, a Pollock painting in black, white, and red. As the sun comes up the image becomes both more real and less real at the same time. Before long they bring him a towel and a uniform and tell him to get cleaned up. John does.

Today he is graduating to Thirteen. He’s the first. And he is alone.


	2. Chapter 2

The next time he steps foot into the dining hall is a week later, after his exhaustion finally beat out his insomnia and he managed to sleep four hours without dreaming. It’s enough for him to stop seeing double but not enough to actually be clear-headed enough to remember ~~Kate~~ , so he counts it as a win and drags himself to get breakfast that isn’t dry biscuits and tepid milk.

It is not, however, enough for him to realise upon stepping into the dining hall that everyone’s eyes are trained on him. He manages to grab a tray, load it with edibles, walk to the tables without tipping the tray, find an empty seat, set the tray on the table, sit down smoothly, and raise a spoonful of food to his open mouth before noticing that he is basically lit up with invisible bright red sniper-scope dots. He puts the food in his mouth, chews, and swallows, while inwardly cursing himself _slow slow slow_. He then commences to resolutely ignore them all while eating and hoping that he can get enough glucose in his blood in time to fight off the paranoid lynch mob about to form.

Whatever it is, he’s gotten this far. It would be waste to be killed by his –

Abruptly, a boy from the Seven group stands up and walks determinedly towards him. John watches him out of the corner of his eye. It’s only when the boy is 6 metres from him that he realises that the boy is actually a girl with her brown hair cut short. _The battle that ~~Harley~~_ John stops his thoughts. The girl stops right in front of him. Slowly, deliberately, John looks up.

The girl is twitching slightly because she doesn’t dare to fidget. She stammers, ‘Uh – I – uh – did-you-really-bite-Instrummer-Tomke?’

John looks at her blankly for a while (which he will later blame on the sleep deprivation), and simply bursts out laughing. He drops his spoon and covers his face and just _shakes_ and _shakes_ with giggles. He laughs for so long that some of the other tables start chuckling too, while the girl stands wide-eyed pressing her lips together and exchanging baffled glances with her table. That only makes John laugh harder.

After a long, long while that makes John’s abdominal muscles ache like a good training session and lifts some of the cotton wool filling his skull, he motions for the girl to sit down opposite him, which she does, leans in conspiratorially and stage-whispers, ‘Yes, I did.’

The girl goes even wider-eyed which damn near sets John off again, but he manages to just keep it together as she whispers back, ‘Why did you do it?’

Just like that his good mood evaporates instantly. It feels like the slick clean surfaces of the walls and floors are so smooth that even moods slip like ghosts through them, leaving no memory. And some nights John can’t shake the feeling that if he were to take the walls apart he’d find something horrible behind it; and that even in broad daylight the creeping horror would seep in slowly insidiously through the almost-translucent white walls. What can he tell her? He can’t tell her about his nightmares, now all the more powerful because he knows how it ends. He can’t tell her about ~~David’s~~ screaming. He finally settles for, ‘I did it for my friend.’

The girl leans closer and drops her voice almost inaudibly low. ‘What happened to him?’

John freezes. He can’t tell her. _He can’t tell her._

He pulls back, thinks of Harley appearing puffy-eyed in the mornings from crying all night from stress, of James hoarding his storybooks desperately despite the wardens’ active disapproval, of Kate willingly pouring her lifeblood out of her. He can only say, ‘They broke.’

And because he knows that’s as much as he can get away with, possibly more, he stands up and clears his half-eaten tray.

*

They do have a disciplinary meeting, but they’ve got too much riding on him, the (apologetic) golden boy, and they let him go. John is slightly disappointed at how distressingly easy it is to manipulate them. As he’s leaving, though, he overhears Warden Christian report that someone had bitten an instructor in class, and the unbridled glee that bubbles up his chest more than makes up for his week. He has to school his face hard and slip away quickly so he can lock himself in his room, throw himself on the bed and laugh and laugh at the ceiling.

_They’re looking up to me._

He is determined not to let the feeling go, so he keeps laughing till he falls asleep.

*

Graduation Day is looming. The day itself doesn’t have an official name, but enough of the adults have used that term that John has labelled the day as such in his mind. Like all his other graduation days, there’s not very much pomp and circumstance involved, just the necessity of getting on with another year of work. Unlike all his other graduation days, this time he is going somewhere, permanently.

_Call it what it is_ , John admonishes himself. _Out._ He’s moving out.

It makes his fingers tingle, the idea that he’s going to go where there isn’t a tapered white slate ceiling with hidden lighting seeping in from the sides, that he will be able to walk out of these uniform empty walls and sound-trapping carpeted floors. He is going to get a room that isn’t decorated in white on white with white accents, he is going to wear things that he’s only ever seen in presentation slides and far-fetched books, he is going to get his _own things_. John can’t even imagine what that means. He’s going to get his own bathroom, and what really makes him light-headed is the idea that he is going to meet people other than everyone else at the –

Facility, is what he’s supposed to call it, when he tells people (which is not very often, if he understood correctly.) There’s a whole other set of briefings that he needs to undergo before the day actually arrives, but that doesn’t stop him from itching.

He’s going to meet new people. The idea feels too big to fit into his brain, which is ironic, because he can fit two hundred years of modern history into his head without a problem and he can identify any kind of phaser weapon pointed at his face on sight and amalgamate four kinds of martial art into a single functional form, but he can’t fully grasp the fact that he is _going to meet new people_.

John wonders what they will look like. John wonders if they will look like him.

Instructor Gregor smacks his ruler down on the table, narrowly missing his nose, and John wonders if Instructor Gregor is feeling sexually insecure in his relationship with his wife.

‘ _Meester_ John. Vould you like to tell me vhat is ze ignition mechanism of a fat-man type bomb?’

John answers, ‘Compression of the central radioactive core by external detonation of conventional explosives,’ in the same tone that he would say ‘Not in the least, you fat Russian slug.’ However that would get him reprimanded like when he called Warden Walker ‘an uncultured hick Yank[1]’, so he refrains from doing it. (In the tradition of school systems everywhere, nobody knows exactly how the kids learn all the swear words known to man by Eleven.)

Instructor Gregor, whose narrow eyes always seem to see more than he lets on, narrows his eyes at John, then relaxes them, and tells him in a surprisingly gentle tone that their lesson is over for the day. John isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he runs out of engineering class one hour early. Instructor Gregor looks at the fluttering scrap of notepaper he left and allows himself a smile. John’s been buzzing since he was told a week ago that he could graduate one year early.

*

When John returns from breakfast (his last breakfast in– _inside_ ), an open trunk has been placed in the middle of his tiny room for him to fill with his belongings. It takes up 1/12th of his floor space. John isn’t sure what to do with the irony.

The trunk is actually mostly a courtesy, for John to transport his soon-to-be-useless textbooks and notebooks. John can’t fit his bed or his chair into it, and he’s been told that that’s foolish. He apparently doesn’t need to bring any of his uniforms either, but he’s going to just in case. He also has something else very important to transport.

John makes sure his door is locked before pulling his bed slightly away from his cabinet. Then he drags his desk over to a corner by his bed. He climbs on his bed, on his desk, and then onto the wire frame of the bed, praying hard that the footholds he found for his Eleven feet still fit him. The steel bars are much smaller and more slippery this time but he only needs to get on top of his cabinet, which he hopes will not topple under the weight he’s gained in six years. He adds a bit of spring from the bedframe, lands precariously on the wobbling, protesting shelves, waits for the cabinet to cease rocking, and then reaches up to a dusty ceiling panel. He lifts and moves it aside and scrabbles in the space until he finds a haphazard bundle of yellowed paper that hasn’t been touched in what seems like decades.

The first page of the bundle reads _Moby Dick_ across the top.

John hops down from the cabinet onto his bed, quickly pushes his desk and bed back into order, and sets about hiding the bundle in his other books. Two pages here, four pages there, John makes sure that each page is invisible to an outside observer, crams them into the box like sardines to discourage people from meddling with it, and then layers his neatly folded uniforms on top, covering everything. Just for show, he locks the trunk up to imply that he doesn’t expect it to be opened.

They do, of course, open it, but as expected they don’t look far beyond glancing over the books placed under his clothes. John smuggles out his secret treasure with impunity, although he does get odd looks about the drab uniforms he apparently found precious enough to take.

After his trunk is taken away to be loaded, John is given a set of normal clothes to change into. It’s an indication of how little they actually value his belongings that they didn’t give him the option of taking the clothes he was already wearing, but John knows to pick his fights and changes without comment. He doesn’t understand some of the clothes and ends up with the jumper pulled over the coat, but the general principle of going by size serves him reasonably well, and the jumper mishap is quickly remedied once he steps out by Warden Gellen, who is dressed similarly. John only has a brief moment to think in awe, _This is what normal people wear._

Warden Gellen eyes him. ‘You ready, boy?’

John thinks that now he’s going Out, he shouldn’t be called boy anymore, but he dutifully replies, ‘Yes, ma’am.’

And Warden Gellen takes him Out.

*

John, being John, which is to say, John being a fearless young whippersnapper newly let out into a brand spanking new world for the first time, gets into a barfight. He’s wise enough to wait until he’s more or less settled into his new life outside and isn’t gawking at everything that passes by him, and also as instructed does not display any of the superior mêlée fighting skills that he’s mastered, but he still manages to get himself into thoroughly deserved trouble by accidentally using the wrong form of ‘beautiful’ on an Orion woman.

In the deafening silence that falls afterward, a glowering Cardassian man slowly rises from a nearby table and bends his head questioningly to the woman, but the woman merely shakes her head briefly at him, gets up from the bar, turns away… and then swings right around and belts John full on the mouth.

John falls back doing his best impression of what in archaic terms was called a ‘windmill’ and ends up falling into the lap of the next person sitting along the bar, simultaneously inhospitably whacking said person on the nose, whereupon that person gives a roar of pain and tries to swat him away, but John has already slipped onto the floor in shock so the swat connects with the Orion woman’s face instead. With that, all-out war is declared and John is left to defend his person from hopefully no longer unforeseen attacks, involving flying fists and flying crockery alike.

_Perhaps_ , John thinks, as he dodges a half-drunk haymaker from behind, _the ill-prepared facilities_ , John smashes an empty glass bottle on an attacker charging him with a butter knife, _the dubious décor_ , John grabs a ceramic pirate cutlass off the wall and uses it to bat off an eight-foot animated suit of Kreetassan armour, _the geographic location –_ and here John’s thoughts are cut off as a muscular arm wraps around his throat and tries to choke him out. John grabs on hard to the trunk of muscle, kicks his leg back up to hit the back of his attacker’s head, twists the man’s arm 180° the wrong way when his grip loosens, and swings him like a shotput, right into the backs of three men with their shirts off, facing down another three men wearing only bowler hats and kilts. The crescendo of noise is enough to buy him a brief window whereby he skips behind a screen, up the steps and out the door of the bar.

_– should have informed you that this was a really, REALLY bad idea,_ John finishes his sentence, bent over and panting hard. It’s barely half an hour from when he decided to step out and investigate the city’s ‘nightlife’, but the sun has in that time forsaken his ill-conceived venture and drifted under the horizon in disapproval, leaving downtown in lamplit darkness.

John feels liquid on his lip, so he wipes it away quickly with his sleeve and boards a bus to get home. His mind is whirring loudly from his first real taste of a fight, almost as if it hadn’t left the bar itself and was still happily tussling with the rowdy crowd back there. After he shuts the door to his plain off-white ( _off-white is still better than all white_ ) apartment, his legs finally realise that they no longer need to maintain the fight-or-flight response and dump him on the floor with his back against his door, and because he’s still got no idea what he’s supposed to do he just giggles and giggles until he’s light-headed.

Oddly enough, when he finally has the presence of mind to haul his butt off the floor and take a look at his injuries, he doesn’t find any. No splotched bruises, no smarting cuts, no sprained ligaments, nothing. John wipes the flaked blood off his lower lip and finds it completely unblemished. He isn’t sure what to do about that either.

*

John is not John today. He is Juan Marcos, currently sipping a _capuchino_ in the lovely warm spring sunshine at a café table in the _barrio_ of La Boca of Buenos Aires. He is wearing a light pink shirt, a coffee-coloured jumper, a red-tartan-lined cream jacket, slightly worn brown trousers, aged black brogues, a Panama hat, today’s local newspaper, and a small, bricklike black phone. Juan Marcos is reading the newspaper as he has every day since he arrived a week ago from Ecuador on a simple, low-key vacation. He is ignoring the phone.

The phone buzzes, briefly. Juan doesn’t hear it as he is preoccupied with an article on the health benefits of seafood.

The phone buzzes again, and this time he does hear it. He picks it up, taps out a quick reply, and returns to his article.

A short while later a man dressed in dark trousers and a black leather jacket appears from across the street and crosses to his table. Juan rises a little to meet him.

‘¡Hola! Igualmente.’[2]  
‘El gusto es mio,’[3] Juan replies, because this is true. He is here to glean things from this man, not the other way round.

The man takes off his shades and sits down. Juan waves a waiter over and the man orders a _cortado_. Juan makes some small talk while waiting for the waiter to return. The man converses with him looking steadily across the table with a smile on his lips and a glare in his eyes. Juan waits for the waiter to bring the coffee and leave before asking in Greek, ‘The documents?’

‘Show me your hand and I’ll show you mine,’ the man replies, equally fluent.

‘Nine thousand, if they’re what you say.’

The man blinks and licks his lips briefly before replying calmly, ‘They are.’

‘May I see your hand, then?’

‘Give me the transfer and they’re all yours.’

‘Now now, that’s hardly fair. I have shown you my hand and you have yet to fulfil your promise.’

‘I will show them to a specialist. Anyone less experienced will not realise what they are.’

‘Are you certain you are willing to wait until I engage a specialist?’

‘If that’s what it takes, yes.’

Juan picks up his phone with a slight exasperated sigh and peruses it for a while. The man tries not to stare at him by sipping his _cortado_. Juan is still furrowing his brow and making ‘hmm’ sounds at the tiny screen of his outdated phone when the man finishes his drink.

‘Well?’

‘I am afraid I cannot engage a specialist in such a short time… I’m not sure. I think I will have to decline.’

‘You can’t decline. We had an agreement.’

‘Yes, but you see, I am also in a difficult position, my superiors would find it irresponsible of me to make such a big investment on just pure faith. Don’t misunderstand, please, I trust your character fully, after all I would not have come if I did not. But my superiors do not know you and they do not understand, and I have to explain to them…’

‘Fine! A glance. Here.’ The man hands over his black bricklike phone.

‘A glance is sufficient. Many thanks.’ Juan furrows his brow at the other phone and resumes making the man twitchy and nervous, for much longer than needed to confirm that the blueprints he is looking at are fake.

‘Yes, thank you, I think it is alright… I will give you the transfer number. Here.’

‘Good. Good. Here they are.’ The man hands a paperclip-sized chip over as he takes back his phone. Juan nods and smiles like a satisfied cat.

‘I thank you for this transaction, my friend. Keep well.’ Juan holds out his hand for the man to shake.

‘Yes, goodbye.’ The man grabs his hand briefly and leaves without looking back. Juan returns to his newspaper and his _capuchino_.

That night, a warehouse on the outskirts of town that was tracked by a bug placed on one Mario Hernández’s phone is burnt to the ground, with an unknown number of casualties. The next morning, a man in a Panama hat boards a plane to London from Buenos Aires International Airport.

 

[1] Because the Federation is global, calling anyone by their nationality is automatically an insult.

[2] Hello! It’s a pleasure to meet you.

[3]The pleasure is mine.


	3. Chapter 3

Upon returning from Argentina, John went for his first post-mission checkup, where they extracted a sample of blood from him. John thought it was odd because the rest of the checkup was noninvasive, but they never did it again, so he didn’t think much of it.

*

John, today, is John Hunter, an English engineering graduate taking a gap year travelling the world. If he wants to, he could spend a year here in Shanghai, but he won’t.

He is, however, being very sorely tempted to.

Months of research and psychological profiling and weeks of staking out bars in the area where her IP address was traced to has led to this, a fierce proud woman made beautiful by her confidence, straddling his hips and smirking down at him with the kind of catlike smile that can only lead to bad things, unbuttoning his shirt with fingers made nimble from years of typing code as her mother tongue. Today she is not hacking a firewall or kernel but the heart of one ingénue foreign boy with a really pretty accent.

 _So much for anti-colonialism_ , John thinks to himself as the lynx-eyed, vellum-skinned woman kisses her way down his chest.

Later, as the woman calling herself Nara breathes contentedly beside him, John asks her, ‘What’s your name, Nara?’

With the night gloom of the hostel room a protective blanket keeping out the paranoid world, Nara forgets to be cautious and replies sleepily, ‘Narantsetseg, it means sun flower…’

John feels a straw-stalk of relief at the fact that he has gotten the right target. He also thinks, _Quite appropriate._

In the morning, John prevents Nara from making a one-night stand of it by waking up before she does. John can see the exact moment she decides to go with it as she looks over him innocently bringing two cups of fragrant coffee back from the kitchen. _All in a day’s work_ , John thinks. _But_ , he adds as Nara walks up to him with his jacket loosely thrown over her shoulders and stretches up on tip-toe to kiss him, _that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it while it lasts._

*

When they part on the second day, Nara leaves him a number, which John checks as soon as she walks away. When Nara picks up John tells her he already misses the sound of her voice and they talk until she gets onto a tram. John is tempted to try to track her apartment but he senses that that will be an enterprise on a whole other level to his previous skiddie[1] work, and he can’t blow his cover this early in the mission, when the goal is so far from sight. _She’ll show you soon enough anyway, if you play it right._ Still, it’s tempting.

Contrary to popular belief, sunflowers don’t actually track the direction of the sun, but their buds do, which is why sunflowers often bloom facing the east. Narantsetseg doesn’t mean sunflower but sun flower and she’s always dreaming and anticipating bright and beautiful things. Nara is not a stupid person – one doesn’t get to legendary status in the Chinese underground hacker community before age thirty without some serious brains, and not just of the computer kind – but Nara is human and Nara gets tired of being wide awake paranoid all the time.

For her, John tries to be a bright and beautiful thing.

John tells stories of seeing the brilliant white walls of the Taj Mahal shimmering in the August sunlight, of being reminded of the blinding pure colour of the Alpine snow, of getting in trouble for throwing a nickel off the Empire State Building on a dare, of almost getting mugged in South Africa and avoiding it through his impression of a South African accent. Nara, who’s never been outside of the borders of what used to call itself the People’s Republic of China, is utterly enthralled. John shows her photos he didn’t take of the Cappella Sistina and Cathédral Notre-dame de Chartres (they are his case agent[2]’s. His case agent is single), explaining that he didn’t feature in them because he was travelling alone.

‘That must have been very brave,’ Nara says, her head resting on his shoulder.

‘It was either that or suffer having my mother along,’ John replies, lifting his head from the headboard of the bed to show on his face exactly what he thought of the latter option. Nara laughs with commiseration that can only come from experience. John also explains why he’s not going to his parents for money that way. _I’m really getting good at this lying thing_ , John thinks, and wonders why his chest prickles a little at that.

‘What’s your mother called,’ Nara asks, out of the blue.

‘Martha,’ John replies automatically, fluent in his cover story. Then he adds, ‘Martha Kate.’

*

Nara lets John move in with her, from the student dorm he was renting out, after he fixes her dysfunctional plumbing. As John kisses Nara in delight the voice in John’s head says, _Told you so_ , and then isn’t particularly verbal after that.

John then has to set up his PADD[3] in order to update his parents, but when he asks Nara for help in integrating to her HS (Home System), she simply replies that she doesn’t have one. John looks around the apartment to verify that the myriad arrays of monitors, blinking servers and wires spilling everywhere like an overgrown black snake infestation, do in fact exist, and therefore correspondingly require a working HS to operate. Nara watches him looking around with a knowing smile on her face.

John finds it refreshing to be the mouse for once. ‘How?’ he capitulates, finally, and Nara comes over to confiscate his PADD, connect it to the sprawling behemoth that is her computer system, and connect him to a HS that one of their neighbours is paying for.

John knows he should let her work in peace but he can’t help asking questions the moment she opens up the command prompt, which then opens up to John the full floodgates of Nara’s manic coding mode. Apparently this operation to override security and privacy protocols designed after three hundred years of development is so simple that she can talk while she types, which means she is talking at the same speed as she is typing, which means that John, who has almost perfect eidetic memory, has to ask her to slow down and repeat herself six times. Nara obliges each time because she’s going too fast to get annoyed, and before John has quite understood what has happened, his PADD is up and running merrily on their neighbour’s HS.

‘And you do the same thing for that?’ John asks, indicating the rest of the system with his chin, blindly closing his fingers around the PADD that Nara is handing to him.

‘Oh _lao tian **[4]**_ , no. I need like, forty-three times the bandwidth. I’ve linked mine to the HS of the office building five blocks up.’

‘… isn’t that _physically impossible_ based on the fact that I haven’t seen you with a room-sized antenna?’

Nara just smiles, again, and points a slow circle around the mass of black wiring inhabiting the sides of her apartment, typical of most hacker accommodations. It’s not just in the living room; there are holes cut out of the doors to accommodate them, they stretch up and down the cabinets and the only place they don’t go is the bathroom. John looks up from the antenna hidden in plain sight slightly slack-jawed with genuine surprise. It’s an ingenious engineering solution to an inescapable software problem and John should not feel so delighted at being outclassed. It’s dangerous.

‘So,’ John returns her devil-cat smile, ‘what else can you do?’

*

It’s been a while since John’s gone to bed with a headache that wasn’t induced by some sort of physical exhaustion, but keeping up with Sansar[5] Narantsetseg, giving a crash course in undermining every single digital structure that holds the Federation together, does that to you. John learns fast enough and knows enough about computer theory for Nara not to get frustrated, but they’ve still spent the entire day indoors just ‘playing games’ (in her words) on Nara’s system simply to understand how to circumvent factory-set civilian HS restrictions.

John spends the time Nara is away, at her lethally tedious tech support job, drilling the hacks over and over. He doesn’t spend that time trying to crack Nara’s security. He feels like both sides of him have come to an understanding with the singular person named Nara, and Nara is taking the lead in both cases. Waiting is a familiar thing to John.

Nara, conversely, is delighted at having a willing audience in him. She follows his sociable college student example and rambles about her family life, her six siblings, her parents’ pet dog adopted after her youngest brother moved out and before they realised they were having another child (her). She talks about how for her third birthday her siblings scraped together a computer with a child keyboard for her and how she hasn’t gone a day without touching a keyboard since. She talks about her family’s trying to keep up with her adult brain in a child body by giving her everything she wanted, when she ultimately realised she needed different things. She speaks, with relish, about befuddling her teachers in school, something John can easily empathise with.

She talks about how small and lost she felt when she arrived in Shanghai, armed with only a _summa cum laude_ computer science degree and the business card of a family friend who owned a little tech company in the city. She talks about how her feet suddenly seemed three sizes smaller and unable to balance her after making the leap from her home, not looking down until it was too late and she’d landed in the eye of the centuries-old swirling vortex of a metropolis that was Shanghai. She talks about almost forgetting how the hair fell around her mother’s face when she sewed.

John is almost tempted to warn her not to give away too much of herself – his other self coming out – but then he realises that she hasn’t said a word about why Starfleet is actually interested in her. He’d almost forgotten, and it’s a reminder for him to stay _awake awake awake_ no matter what the act is supposed to be.

He’s also, inexplicably, proud. _She’s got mettle, going this deep and still being cautious._ John realises that she’s also waiting, dappled-fur lynx crouched invisible and silent in the snowy shadows, waiting to make a move. It makes him smile at her, this devious beautiful brilliant creature, with real affection.

 _In another life, perhaps, ~~she would have understood me~~._ The criminal thought makes him hold her a little tighter at night.

*

‘So how are you finding the weather?’

‘It’s great, it’s to my taste.’

‘Good. Don’t want you to get too worn out.’

‘Don’t worry, mum, I’m taking care of myself.’

‘So have you got a job yet?’

‘Yeah, I’ve just got a temp job downtown, I’m starting soon.’

‘Good. That’s great. Now you just remember to be nice to everyone and if they’re doing good work you help them out proper, all right?’

‘Yes, mum. Bye, mum.’

‘Goodbye, John. We miss you.’

‘I miss you too.’

John closes the call window with a queerly cold feeling in his chest. [6]

*

One day, when Nara leaves him practicing obfuscating tracks in a Linux-derivative system to go to her book club, she leaves her reading glasses on the living room table. John notices this before she leaves but he waits for her footsteps to disappear down the narrow concrete hallway before snatching it up and dashing after her. He then dashes back into the house, grabs a pair of dark glasses, and runs out again, taking care to lock everything securely.

He knows an invitation when he sees one.

He steps onto the street and assumes the hunched, preoccupied, scuttling gait of the career coder, young and poor and spending way too much time shut up indoors staring into flickering computer monitors cobbled together from salvaged parts. He keeps his eye on one woman with a single simple ponytail wearing a worn beige felt blazer carrying a black scuffed (fake) Ferragamo shoulder bag under her left arm, like a million other women passing by him. He tracks the right one by momentary glimpses of the back of her head moving regularly back and forth, like a musical beat in his head, flickering in and out of view behind the vertical venetian-blind layers of people between them, sometimes too far but never too close.

Nara enters another apartment complex no different from the one she stays in, like every other one in the industrial district. Nara enters the complex like she lives in it. John takes a moment to stop outside and peer at the block number before entering the less crowded lobby and tracking the moving lift going to the second last basement level.

John doesn’t see her in the basement hallway. That’s not a problem, because once the elevator doors close, John leans down and sniffs the door handle of the unit nearest to him. Without the fear of security cameras in the basement, he can methodically track down the smell of the alcohol spray Nara uses on her silicone keyboards, and he takes full advantage of this rare gap in surveillance. The door that is scent-marked with Nara’s hand smell is unlocked.

John breathes a moment before he pushes it open.

Whatever he was expecting, he didn’t expect to be greeted with a flippant, ‘Oh, hey, Nara’s boytoy is here.’

As John stares at the shadowy plywood entryway wall, the door is shut behind him. John spins around in the narrow space and almost crashes into the slight, dark-haired woman fastening the door. The way she handles herself casually and familiarly in the phonebooth-like entrance, and doesn’t even deign to glance at this intruder, gives John the distinct impression he is a guest in her house, and she knows it.

‘I didn’t know vibrators could walk. [smack] OW!’

The Han[7] woman gives John an amused smile and rolls her eyes. John returns the smile and follows her out the narrow, oddly dark hall, through another door into the brightly-lit kitchen, whereupon the woman shades her eyes, turns around and disappears. John has to blink before he realises that she’s turned behind the wall that extends into the kitchen from the hallway and she’s opening another door. The entire layout is designed to disorient people trying to get in. _Doubtful efficacy, but would probably buy enough time to lay an ambush. Or run._ John would not have been fully surprised if that door led to an entire maze, but this is reality, and that door leads to a large, semi-dark room which makes the word ‘hive’ leap to mind. Amidst the sprawling nest of black wires, racks of processors along the walls, buzzing refrigerator parts and side tables overflowing with papers and food wrappers alike, Nara is sitting sideways on a central square table island loaded with monitors, glaring down at a lanky younger Han man leaning back in his desk chair and putting his hands and smile up defensively.

‘Chill, man, it was a joke. Shadow, help me out here.’

Shadow, the woman, just raises her eyebrows at him, before turning to Nara. ‘Feel like introducing us?’

Nara gives the man a lingering glare as she gets up. ‘John, this is Shadow. Shadow, this is –’

‘Boytoy,’ the other, nominally a man, cuts in.

‘That’s just cruel.’

‘And you are?’

‘Eh, you can call me Panda.’

‘More like Starving Panda,’ Shadow mutters, and they chuckle, while Panda shrugs flippantly.

‘Nice to meet you, Shadow.’ John shakes her hand warmly.

‘And what brings you here?’

‘Oh, I, uh, you forgot this,’ John fumbles in his jacket and hands Nara her reading glasses. Nara takes it, beaming meaningfully at him.

‘You’re a good tracker,’ Shadow says.

‘She’s hard to miss.’

Shadow looks from him to Nara and then just goes to the kitchen.

Panda diffuses the awkwardness. ‘Don’t worry, man. She’s just paranoid ‘cause she works in the government.’

‘I see. Um, is there anyone else coming?’

Panda stills. ‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, that table has four stations and there’s only three of you.’

Panda looks at the table – _inexperienced_ – but Nara replies instead. ‘Yes, there’s one more. He’s called Penguin.’

‘What, are you guys trying to open a zoo?’

‘Oh trust me, we’ve got our hands full just dealing with _him_ ,’ Shadow says, returning from the kitchen with a cup of _tieguanyin **[8]**_ which she hands to John. John nods at her in thanks and joins in the laughter. Two weeks later, he moves his own chair in, and Shadow just smiles at him, while Panda cheers at the beer he brought along.

*

‘Too dangerous. They’ll see us.’

‘We can get out before they realise it.’

‘They’ll see us after, for sure. They have authentication logs.’

‘Dozens of people use it every day.’

‘Each with a fraction of the bandwidth we need, yes!’

‘It’s the only one we can access from here!’

‘I’m not too interested in being evicted from our _only_ workspace and getting a record before we do anything!’

‘What do you propose, then?’

‘I don’t know, but the least we can do is wait until we come up with a better – a _secure_ solution.’

‘What’s this about?’ John takes the opportunity to interject at a breath in the argument. Shadow and Penguin’s heads snap to look at him in unison, which is kind of amusing. Panda peeks in from the kitchen where he was hiding.

‘We’re discussing how to obtain an internet connection adequate for our needs.’ Penguin is wearing the dress shirt and pants required for his job, but has slung his jacket and tie over the back of his chair.

‘Very loudly,’ Panda adds from behind John.

‘What’s the problem?’

‘Well, I want to try just using the one from the tech park next door.’

‘Because you’re too used to risk and impatience in your day job. I do exactly this kind of work, I can _tell_ you they will find us.’

‘Can you get another source?’ John interrupts before the two of them can get started again.

‘Is this the uplink thing?’ Nara has arrived, and Panda immediately assumes control of the bags full of groceries. ‘The ideal one is the router station itself, but it’s a hard ask even on the top floor, never mind down here.’

They fall silent, and Panda silently brings out four cups of precariously balanced tea. Miraculously, none of them spill. _Waiter_ , John automatically pegs him.

John knows Panda and Penguin are siblings. John knows Penguin’s ‘day job’ is a stocks trader. John knows the cabal, as he has taken to calling them, is planning something huge.

John knows how to solve this problem.

‘What’s the biggest metal object around here?’

‘Huh?’ Nara, for once, looks confused.

‘Biggest metal thing you can get your hands on.’

‘Er, I dunno. The table, maybe.’

John replies Nara with her smile. ‘Nope. Bigger.’

‘Get to the point,’ Shadow says.

‘You’re located next to the elevator.’

‘How the fuck do we link to the elevator? It moves around all the time.’ Panda has a point.

‘Yeah, but the elevator shaft doesn’t.’ The blooming delight in John’s heart mirrors the dawning realisation on the others’ faces.

*

They wait with bated breath for their pinging target to load. John is as tense as the others, which is bad, because he is specifically trained not to do so. His training is not working.

 _Relax_ , he tries to tell himself. _This might all come to nothing._

‘It should be instant, right? Last I checked the speed of light was still bloody fucking fast, in scientific terms.’

‘Shhh,’ Penguin shushes Panda.

‘Maybe there’s a problem with the connection,’ John says, or tries to say, but Nara slaps a hand over his mouth without glancing away from the monitor. The rest of them don’t move.

John counts the seconds in his head, like in a hostage situation. It doesn’t make the time pass any faster.

Finally, finally, at 5 minutes and 24 seconds, the connection works. They whoop, jump, hug, and then Shadow kills the connection as quickly as it was linked.

‘We know it works. Don’t need to leave it open more than we need. Let’s do this.’

They go out for lunch, get some groceries, and then regroup. They set up at their workstations, with John in the background keeping an eye on the connection. They open the connection.

They are trying to hack into the secure network of the internationally operating Chinese organised crime group named White Lotus in order to obtain the identities of a new local cell.

They do.

*

Panda bought a cake along with the rest of their supplies because ‘if we succeed, we’ll want it, if we don’t, we’ll need it.’

‘I thought that was for alcohol,’ Nara responded dubiously. ‘Besides, I’ll get fat.’

‘Me too,’ Shadow added.

Panda ignored them. ‘More for me, then.’ He doesn’t follow through with that threat, though, and cuts generous slices for them both.

‘Mm,’ Shadow says, with the first bite. ‘Rum cake. Little wonder.’

‘He’s legal, right?’ John asks of Penguin. Panda looks offended, Penguin narrows his eyes at Panda, and Nara and Shadow laugh.

‘I wish he wasn’t,’ Penguin mumbles to his cake, chuckling.

They chat for a bit more and pop open the soda before John asks, ‘So what now?’

‘What’s that?’ Shadow replies.

‘What do we do with this information, anyway? Pass it on to the police?’

Everyone’s eyebrows collectively rise as if John’s just proposed to sell eggs to a hen. ‘What?’ he asks, glancing around.

Now everyone is looking between each other. John knows this look for debating whether or not to let an outsider in on something. Panda and Nara look at Shadow and Penguin, and eventually Penguin looks at Shadow.

John used to be Shadow.

She takes the plunge. ‘We’re planning something else, actually.’

‘Oh.’ John pretends to be surprised. ‘Am I allowed to know what it is?’

Shadow looks at Nara, and Nara starts explaining their plans to target the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China[9] as a publicity stunt to attract attention, and hopefully, lucrative jobs. John feels his chest run cold again and drinking his tea doesn’t help in the slightest.

*

2038 hours: Nara sends John a message saying she’ll be staying at the cabal house for the night, like she has almost every other day since their operation succeeded. John expected this and consumes his half of the dinner for two he prepared.

2239 hours: John enters Nara’s system using her authorisation credentials he obtained from discreetly watching her.

2244 hours: John locates the system of the security station of the apartment complex housing the new local White Lotus cell, enters it, leaves a programme designed to trigger at a set time, covers his tracks, and leaves.

2251 hours: John changes into a repairman uniform which he obtained in order to carry out repair work at the cabal house, cutting through the solid concrete wall to get to the elevator shaft.

2259 hours: John puts his wallet and passport in his overalls pocket, grabs his cello-case-sized toolkit, leaves the house, and locks the doors behind him.

2310 hours: A repairman steps onto night bus line 311 at a bus station.

2346 hours: A repairman steps off night bus line 311 at a bus station.

2359 hours: A repairman walks into an apartment complex.

0003 hours: A repairman has to buzz for the security station after spending 4 minutes searching in his pockets, in his toolkit, and under his hat for his access card.

0004 hours: A repairman is waved through the nighttime access gates[10] by a bleary-eyed security guard while apologising profusely for absent-mindedness.

0015 hours: A repairman locates unit 14F, detaches his detachable stepladder from his carrying case, pulls out some tools, and gets to work on the utilities unit of the apartment.

0017 hours: The feed from the CCTV camera covering the entrance to 14F, the back of the repairman’s head, and not the main body of the utilities unit, freezes.

0018 hours: John cuts off power to unit 14F.

0023 hours: The security guard on duty falls asleep in his chair at the security station.

0025 hours: John picks the lock on the entrance door to 14F. He slips inside and locks the door behind him.

0029 hours: John’s eyes have fully adjusted to the dark. He pulls off his shoes and socks, slinks up to the man sleeping on the living room couch, and breaks his neck as his eyes open.

0030 hours: A voice calls out, ‘ _Ah Qian_? _Shi ni ma_? [11]’ John situates himself outside the door and does not reply. When the door opens John swings his right arm around in a wide arc and connects his fist with the man’s sternum, stopping his heart.

0031 hours: John backs away from the bedroom door as the remaining 3 cell members converge on him. They stare each other down in the gloom. Then they jump.

0032 hours: John lunges for the one in the middle, out of the way of the other two. John’s left hand blocks the man’s blow with his right arm while his right fist connects with the man’s throat. His trachea collapses and his body goes limp with pain. John drives his knee into the man’s temple, knocking him out.

0033 hours: John swings around and blocks the next man’s blow with his left arm while slamming his open palm into the man’s left ear. When he drops his head in pain, John grabs hold of his head and brings his right hand down like a knife on the man’s lower nuchal region[12]. He feels the man’s vertebra crunch and separate under his hand.

0034 hours: The last cell member has gone to the open kitchen and grabbed a chef’s knife. John flings the recently-paralysed cell member’s body at him, lets him get his knife stuck in the body, then runs towards him, grabs his head with both hands like a basketball, and lets his own momentum drive his skull into the wall.

0035 hours: John makes sure the last man is not breathing, then goes to snap the unconscious third man’s neck. He then opens a wall socket and starts stripping open the wires.

0038 hours: John replaces the wall socket, turns on the gas in the kitchen and walks out the door. He checks himself in the light of the corridor that there aren’t any suspicious marks on him. He hides the ones on his sleeves by rolling them up. He locks the door again and gets back on the stepladder.

0040 hours: The feed from the CCTV camera covering 14F goes live again.

0042 hours: The repairman finishes his work, packs up his things, and leaves.

0052 hours: The repairman has to wake up the security guard again in order to get buzzed out. He is very sheepish.

0057 hours: John ducks into a dark public restroom in order to put on the overcoat and shirt stored in a plastic bag in his toolkit. He places the stained shirt in the bag.

0058 hours: John scatters the contents of the toolkit amongst a few nearby dumpsters.

0143 hours: John boards a taxi to the opposite side of town.

0239 hours: John gets off the taxi to the opposite side of town. He pays the driver in cash. He goes into the darkened buildings and puts the shirt in an alleyway, half buried in the dirt. He folds up the plastic bag and keeps it on him.

0254 hours: John boards a taxi to Pudong International Airport.

0319 hours: John gets off the taxi at Pudong International Airport. He pays the driver in cash. He enters the terminal and inspects the flight schedule.

0325 hours: John buys a ticket to a 5.10 am flight to Heathrow International Airport.

0425 hours: John boards the half-deserted plane along with the other passengers.

0500 hours: The dumpster trucks start their rounds around Shanghai.

0508 hours: John’s flight is cleared for takeoff.

0712 hours: An apartment on the 14th floor of an apartment complex explodes when the morning pickup surge causes a short-circuit in the wall socket which ignites a buildup of gas from a leakage.

0715 hours: Nara’s phone alarm wakes her up at the cabal house.

0714 hours the day before: John kisses the temple of the sleeping Nara and thinks, _God, she’s so young._

 

[1] ed.: Script kiddie, someone who uses scripted hacks without knowing how they work. Button-presser, not coder.

[2] ed.: Handler.

[3] ed.: Personal Access Display Device a.k.a. iPads of Trekverse

[4] ed.: 老天, ‘my God’

[5] ed.: Clan name chosen by Jügderdemidiin Gürragchaa, first Mongolian cosmonaut. It means ‘cosmos’ in Mongolian.

[6] ed.: Yes, that conversation is coded. No, I’m not cracking it for you.

[7] ed.: 汉, the majority race in China.

[8] ed.: 铁观音, a type of oolong tea.

[9] ed.: ICBC, the largest bank in China, as of 2013.

[10] ed.: Customers often insist on repair work being done at night so their facilities are not interrupted.

[11] ed.: 阿千，是你吗? Ah Qian, is that you?

[12] ed.: ie. nape, back of the neck.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (monday update for the monday blues)  
> (also, the tom hiddleston character finally appears)  
> (oh, and also strong language. should I tag that?)

John is sitting in a modestly plush chair in a neat, well-furnished office, facing away from the faux carved-wood door. The walls are a subtle dull grey-blue colour contrasting with the dark hazelnut grain of the desk in front of him. The carpet has the colour of raw wool and the consistency of a dog’s undercoat. The white lights are reversed saucer-shapes curved gently to distribute light evenly over the space. Bookshelves with locked glass doors line the wall on his left and tall windows with clean white curtains filtering daylight are situated on his right, lining up with two low armchairs placed around a round glass coffee table supported by a bright yellow block of cabinetry. A quaint gold-rimmed porcelain tea set on a flat metal tray sits at the centre of the table, spick and span, rendering John unable to estimate how long ago it was cleaned. Almost daily, he surmises from his observation of the display racks tastefully garnished with trophies, trinkets and photos, running the length of the back wall.

The table is straight facing John and then curves away on both sides towards the center, with the picture frames, stationery, monitor and lamp all oriented, in anticipation, to the empty thronelike black leather chair, turned about 50° to John’s left from directly facing the door right behind him. They are all waiting.

John is used to waiting.

More than that, he fully expected to be waiting, despite observing when entering the office that the tea room adjacent was occupied. He isn’t surprised when he glances at his regulation watch and sees that it is fifteen minutes past his reporting time. He is, however, slightly taken off guard by the warm prickling sensation that slowly trickles up his spine, which he has been trying to suppress in the meantime.

Finally, the door clicks open. John doesn’t turn his head more than 75° to acknowledge the man’s presence.

‘Well, this is quite something. Slightly off mission specifications, don’t you think?’ The official stalks in briskly holding a folder[1] in front of him. He drops the folder on his stitched leather blotter and lands down in his chair, which would make the chair creak if it were any less disciplined.

‘In what way?’ His first card: incomprehension.

‘We requested something quite specific.’

‘If I recall correctly –’ a joke, he has eidetic memory, but a joke only to himself – ‘your goal was to create a situation that would weaken China’s political position within the Federation.’

‘That was our broader goal, yes.’

‘So what seems to be the problem?’

The official heaves a long-suffering sigh and leans forward, resting his arms on the desk with his hands clasped, clearly expecting much more intelligence from this outstanding agent. ‘My plan was for you to locate the group and help them compromise the Chinese banking network.’

John looks to a corner of the ceiling while considering. ‘That would achieve similar results, yes.’

‘So why didn’t you?’

‘I believe I am allowed to act according to my discretion, since I am the agent on the ground and possessing the most immediate appraisal of the situation –’

‘You didn’t want to cause trouble for the girl you were fucking.’ John stops and looks at the official, perfectly calm, the still waters of a volcanic lake.

‘It’s not my concern if that group gets hauled away to a gulag, but it’s yours, isn’t it? You care about them. About her.’

‘Because she was an integral part of the mission, yes.’ His second card: evasion.

‘A mission specified by me.’ John raises his eyebrows in acquiescence. ‘And _I_ gave you instructions, which you didn’t follow.’

‘I got you what you wanted, didn’t I?’ John watches the official look down again at his report, searching for places to justify his disapproval. He won’t find it, but John lets him look a moment before adding, ‘Got something else, too.’

The official looks up at him without moving his head. ‘And what’s that?’

‘Their names.’ His third card: information.

‘We know their names.’

‘Their handles[2], rather. Their online identities by which they can be tracked.’

‘I see. And why aren’t they in the report?’

‘I’ll give _you_ the names, on one request.’

The official stares him like his guard dog just asked for a paid vacation. ‘And what would that be?’ he asks, measuredly indulgent.

‘That they will not be eliminated.’

‘I wouldn’t expect you to understand the subtleties of social politics –’

‘I beg you to explain. I’m sure I’ll be able to help you more once I understand your goals.’

The official blinks a moment at the audacity of his interruption. His voice is hard. ‘They’re poor, smart and fearless, they’re a time bomb waiting to go off. We can’t –’

John clearly and deliberately says, ‘Civaux, Vienne, Poitou-Charentes.’

‘What’s that?’ The official is halfway to irritable, just as John has timed.

‘The longest continuously-running nuclear power plant, located in France. I’m sure you’re familiar with the history of such things.’

The official across the table meets his gaze. _I have to win this. I will win this._

The scales take ages to tip. ‘Very well, then. Since you are so impressed with them, I’ll take your word for it. And you can have mine that they will be employed to the best of our ability.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ John gets up and leaves without giving the man time to say ‘Wait, you haven’t given me the names yet!’

John later hears that the Digital Affairs Section has gained four new recruits, and doesn’t quite smile to himself.

*

John has been requested to wait in the medical examination room. He hasn’t been told what it’s about, but he’s been assured it’s not about him. He’s leaning against the wall rather than sitting down, as Dr Wilson suggested before going out again. His corneas are relaxed, his ears are open, his thoughts are quiet, and his surroundings are distantly familiar. He wonders, abstractly, how long it takes them to scrub the blood off the benches and floors. He hopes it’s a while, because he’s bled a lot.

Dr Wilson returns quickly, carrying a tray of instruments and ushering before him a small, young girl in the standard grey uniform of the facility. Nothing about her stands out, not her little body, not her reserved movement, not her long moderately frizzy black hair, not even the expression on her face as she looks up and down this stranger in front of her with normal, black eyes containing no more than a cursory concern. She climbs onto the patient table from the stepping stool provided and proceeds to ignore him in favour of looking at Dr Wilson in silent expectation.

‘Rachel, this is John. John, this is Rachel.’

Rachel graces him with a cursory flick of a glance, while John smiles politely.

Dr Wilson gets to the point as he reaches out for Rachel’s arm, which she doesn’t offer. ‘Now, I’ve brought John in for a very special reason, Rachel.’ Dr Wilson opens up the Velcro straps fastening her sleeves and pulls them aside to reveal a delicately pale forearm peppered with tiny white pinpricks of needle marks. ‘You see, this serum we’ve been treating you with, it’s a very complex cocktail of proteins and genetic retro[3]-enhancers that are going to make you much, much stronger. Like John here.’ He pulls out a 25mL IV bag of clear fluid with a tube and needle insertion point at the end. He taps Rachel’s forearm a few times with two fingers. ‘We couldn’t do it all alone, though, so we got some help. From John.’ Dr Wilson inserts the needle cleanly and smoothly into her forearm. Rachel is watching but she doesn’t even blink. ‘From his blood, specifically.’ He places a small piece of tape over the seal and hangs the IV bag up on a stand nearby. ‘Now, I know we usually let you do this in your room and continue with your studies in the meantime, but I thought you should meet John and have a bit of a tête-à-tête. You can ask him anything you want, about the school, about the serum, about his work, and he won’t hold anything back, will he?’ Dr Wilson beams at John; John mirrors it. ‘It is his blood flowing through your veins, after all. I’ll be back in a few minutes, talk to your heart’s content.’ Rachel doesn’t mirror Dr Wilson’s smile and stares silently at him as he leaves.

The silence of the whole room seems as stunned as John at the sound of the closing door, except for Rachel who gazes into the floor with her back straight, completely not acknowledging John’s presence. After 2 minutes and 25 seconds of watching the IV bag slowly drain, John tries to break the pea-soup-thick silence.

‘So,’ he begins hesitantly, pushing himself off from the wall, ‘your name is Rachel?’

Rachel encourages him to continue by not responding at all.

‘I knew someone called Rachel. She took great pride in her hair. She’d never been allowed to grow it out, she was a boy before that.’

His fishing is pathetic, and worse, it’s unsuccessful. But he’s never been told how to deal with a child. How to kill a child, sure, not how to talk to one.

‘How are your lessons?’ The words taste foul in his mouth, somehow familiar and strange at the same time, as if he’s mirroring someone he met, long ago. Someone he didn’t like. He sits himself down on the patient bench, looking down at her unresponsive profile, and he doesn’t think she likes him, either. He doesn’t blame her.

‘Is this a new procedure? I didn’t have that when I was here.’ As he says it, it strikes him that none of the children have ever needed infusions of serum, much less regular infusions of it. There are no defective children, he remembers being told, so how –

Oh. Of course. _She’s not from here._

But she doesn’t offer him anything so he doesn’t offer her the information either. He looks down at his lap and bites his lip as Rachel breathes evenly beside him.

He has the feeling of being a fly being mounted under a microscope. It’s not due to the cameras monitoring the examination room, which he long ago acclimated to. He wonders if she feels it. He hasn’t even gotten a good look at her face.

What could he offer her, anyway?

‘You’re good at school, aren’t you?’ he offers. ‘You must be. Very good. I was too. And I was really, really careful not to do anything wrong, so when I was Seventeen they let me go Out. I graduated early.’ He hopes she hears what he’s really saying. ‘And it’s amazing, outside. There’s so much of everything and things you’ve never imagined. It’s like a dream, except it’s real.’ And it has things to watch out for just like inside, he doesn’t say.

‘Anyway, just. Hang in there, okay?’ He pats her shoulder, lightly, awkwardly; she could be a mannequin for all the reaction she gives. ‘You’ll make it, someday.’ The bag is about 85% drained. John, having nothing else to say, joins Rachel in contemplating the linoleum floor.

After another 38 seconds, Rachel stirs and John almost jumps, but she only moves to clamp the line shut when the bag is empty. She then peels the tape off her arm, removes the needle, picks up a small square of gauze and presses it to her arm. She still doesn’t speak.

Twenty seconds later Dr Wilson comes back in and bustles about, packing up and asking them if they had a good talk. John smiles neutrally at him; he has no doubt that Dr Wilson was watching the entire process anyway. When he leaves to dispose of the IV bag, Rachel finally opens her mouth.

‘No,’ she says.

‘Sorry?’

‘You couldn’t have stopped her,’ Rachel replies, and then Dr Wilson comes back in.

Dr Wilson is going to check her over and let her go, so John excuses himself. He takes care to walk measuredly and normally and not trip over his blood running cold. _How did she know that she looks like Kate?_

*

In a rare breach of unstated regulations, they allow John to keep track of the girl. His reason is that ‘intergenerational bonding’ might allow the facility to have an even higher success rate, which has already markedly improved from the 0% of John’s days. They let him meet up with her and her batch for tea where he manages to gain their adulation by talking about the time he bit an instructor. Amidst the noisy, excited questions about the injuries he inflicted, John catches sight of Rachel smiling a reluctant, but nonetheless amused smile, and it kicks his mood up almost as much as the rest of the children combined.

As her batch gets older and group time lessens, John manages to retain his time with her by arguing that she’s as valuable an asset as she is vulnerable, due to her foreign origins, and a stable source of psychological support is crucial to her development. He says that he’s managed to deduce her value from her transferral into the facility and the trouble they must have gone to in order to secure her. He doesn’t say that she read his thoughts and he knows why they want her. ( _Of course not, that would be exceedingly stupid._ )

John gets sent on increasingly complex missions, but the first thing he does as soon as he’s cleared on return is to go see Rachel at the facility. She talks to him, now, about her classmates, about her lessons, about the janitors. She never mentions how she comes to know so much about the people around her, and John doesn’t ask her. He talks about all the funny people and crazy things he sees on his ‘trips’, and takes care to try to remember it especially clearly as he talks, so Rachel can see it too. Rachel thanks him with a warm hug before he leaves, a contact which John treasures, and which he reads carefully every time for any hint of irregularity. Rachel has never given him any, but he reads all the same.

One night while lying on a motel bed in the dark staring at the ceiling in Tokyo, he thinks, _I can’t wait to ~~get home~~_ and has to force the image of long frizzy hair and a timid smile on small thin lips to go away. His crossed fingers clench, empty-handed, on his diaphragm.

*

‘I didn’t know bad driving could be weaponised.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Seriously, I think it has potential, we could threaten to unleash your driver aggression in a given target city as an effective nuclear deterrent.’

John gives up on trying to shut Rachel up by glaring laser daggers at her head. ‘Just help me move the trunk.’

‘We could put you in a warhead. I think your skills qualify as a WMD. Can you hijack a car? How much destruction can you wreak with a moped?’

‘I didn’t actually destroy anything. I’m good at not actually destroying things.’

‘You came close. Like, really close. That last guy, I could practically trace the veins in his eyes. Although that may have had to do with the utter terror on his face.’

‘I didn’t hit him.’

‘The only people who’d believe you are the insurance people. Oh no wait, I’ve got it. Interrogation tactic: car ride with John. How long do you think before they outlaw it in the Geneva Convention?’

John glares laser daggers at Rachel again. Rachel just grins back at him. The disadvantage of being nice to someone is that it very quickly diminishes your ability to intimidate them.

‘I don’t recall you being this mouthy.’

‘I’m only mouthy to people I like.’

‘Does that mean you didn’t like me?’

‘No,’ Rachel replies, the picture of innocent denial.

John opens the trunk and starts putting books that aren’t theirs into the empty bookshelves of a newly transferred government clerk. ‘Here I thought I was going to have to strangle you in your sleep to avenge your slander.’

‘It’s not slander if it’s true,’ Rachel replies quickly, and then equally quickly ducks to avoid getting hit in the head by « _Sonia Maria Sotomayer: Life and Times»_. She ducks to the side rather than down, where John was aiming for. _Well, at least she isn’t totally defenceless._

Rachel shoots him a look that says ‘what do you take me for’, and then they unpack in silence for a while.

‘When did you move out?’ John asks, casually, putting eight books at once onto the shelf with one hand.

‘Last month. I got a room all to myself because I was so young. The first day I locked myself out and had to get an impromptu lock-picking lesson from my neighbour. Her technique is, quote, smash the door and claim self-defence.’

John shoots Rachel an amused look while she mimes fighting with an imaginary door. He then thinks about fighting techniques while they finish unpacking, which is to say, they work until Rachel’s stomach growls loudly and then decide that the remainder makes the space seem lived-in.

‘We can go to the shwarma place down the road,’ Rachel suggests.

‘No need, I brought up the groceries,’ John leads them into the kitchen.

‘Sweet,’ Rachel says. ‘I’ll cook.’

A while later, John is teasing Rachel instead.

*

Rachel has barred the door with her hands on her hips and an expression of morbidly curious horror on her face.

‘Rachel, I need to go to work.’

‘What you _need_ to do is go back to the bathroom, wash all traces of gel out of your hair, and let _me_ do it for you,’ Rachel replies emphatically.

‘Why, what’s wrong with it?’[4]

‘What’s _wrong_ – oh dear god, did you _break_ the mirror with your reflection, is that why you _don’t know what you’re talking about_ ,’ she continues, approaching a level of vehemence that John’s never seen.

‘I’m working in Westminster, I need to look professional –’

‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear the implication that you actually planned on looking like that on a _permanent_ basis, because then I’d probably have to turn you in for crimes against aesthetics.’ With that, Rachel grabs his arm barring any protest, drags him back to the bathroom and subjects John to a harrowing ordeal that he vows never to repeat. He thinks at some point makeup brushes were involved, but settles for putting all memory of it out of his head as quickly as possible when Rachel finally releases him. He also dutifully memorises the resulting look so he can replicate it in the future, instead of having Rachel do it for him.

‘I’m going to be late now,’ John says, as a token futile protest, but Rachel was anticipating it and has already bundled him out the door. That’s more effective than trying to glare him into submission, and anyway he really _is_ going to be late, on his first day no less, so he breaks into a run. After ten steps he suddenly remembers what his first priority really should be and then tries to stabilise his running so that he doesn’t jar his hair too much, while also trying hard not to look like an utter moron who doesn’t understand how running works. He suspects that he fails at one of them. The trade-off is that he doesn’t have to act very much at all to play the flustered nervous newbie when he finally arrives at his workplace.

John spends the rest of the week learning file directories, database suffixes, policy briefs, the detailed floorplan of the Parliament House, and important skills including when and where to percussively fix the coffee machine. He learns, after a rather vocal encounter with a sysadmin, exactly which servers he is allowed to mess with, and also exactly which officials the fifty-nine-year-old printing machine is maintained for. John tries for levity with the senior clerk mentoring him. ‘How is it still alive?’

She’s not amused. ‘Well you’re going to be responsible for it so I suggest you figure it out fast.’ John ducks his head in meek acquiescence.

Four weeks in, John deliberately goes to the wrong office with a pile of paper documentation, sees that the slim, blue-eyed blond is the wrong person, scrambles awkwardly to get out and accidentally spills his armful of documents all over the floor. To his surprise, the man gets up from behind his sleek, spacious desk to join him on the floor and help him.

‘I’m so sorry, uh, Mr, uh –’

‘Holmes, Christopher Holmes.’ The man smiles pleasantly at him from a fine, angular face, accented with one naturally quirked eyebrow, curly dirty blond hair just barely kept in neat shape atop his openly expressive features, holding out a bundle of pages with a long, elegant arm matched in proportions by his slim, lithe legs, folded up panther-like under him, his eyes shining with meaning. _Oh_ , John thinks, _well, I suppose I can work with that too._

‘I’m, ah,’ John hastily takes the papers from Christopher and simultaneously loses his grasp on the ones he’s already managed to gather, whereupon he gives them up temporarily in favour of being polite. ‘John Harrison,’ he smiles back sheepishly at him, shaking Christopher’s still outstretched hand.

 

[1] ed.: These kinds of missions are documented on paper so that physical access, which is more easily policed, is required. For missions on a more complex scale, however, digital systems will inevitably be used.

[2] ed.: Online names, which hackers tend to be faithful to in order to identify themselves.

[3] ed.: ‘Retro’ refers to the mechanism by which they work, which is derived from retroviral reproduction, ie. inserting genetic sequences into the host cells’ genetic material.

[4] ed.: If you’ve seen Cumberbatch’s STID London premiere look, you’ll know what’s wrong with it.


	5. Chapter 5

John suspects that the heat flushing up his skin is going to burn his most expensive suit right off his back. That would be quite a pity, not to mention probably immensely inappropriate, though the way Christopher is eyeing him across the table seems to indicate he wouldn’t mind at all. At the very least, he does need the suit intact so he could possibly pawn it to pay for, well, dessert maybe.

Christopher’s hand brushes his and snaps his attention back. Christopher is leaning towards him, with a comforting rather than lecherous smile on his face. _Misread that. Pay attention._ He lifts his eyebrows at John and tells him in a low, breathy _sotto voce_ , ‘Close your mouth.’

John snaps his jaw shut and smooths down his wood-rigid pressed shirt to try to calm himself. In all his travels he’d only had glimpses of this kind of luxury, and it’s not that he covets it, but he’s used to roughing it and being in the shadows and deflecting attention and there are some places patently unsuited to them. There is also, of course, the question of trying to look like he belongs there, which he’s supposed to be able to do as easily as flexing a muscle. That knowledge is of no help right now and he can’t imagine why.

‘Hey.’ Christopher is rubbing his index finger gently along his hand. ‘Come back. Stop worrying.’

‘What would I be worried about?’

‘ _I_ don’t know what you think about when you run off into that head of yours.’ Christopher’s tone is slightly chiding, and somehow that makes John relax a bit. John decides to thank him.

‘I’ll tell you someday.’ He doesn’t have to say he’ll tell him the truth, but Christopher’s eyes brighten all the same.

The waiter, wearing a dated servants’ uniform that somehow looks posher than John’s own dinner jacket, presents a dish of what the menu described as ‘salade de crabe, mangue, et pamplemousse’. The fact that John can read the half-French menu perfectly only serves to ease his discomfort marginally, since he still doesn’t know what a braisage is. It reminds him of corsage, which he’s been told is a completely different matter.

English as a language makes the least sense to him –

Christopher’s fork clinks against his plate with a portion of the crabmeat. Christopher quirks his eyebrows at him, gently encouraging him to eat instead of treading water inside his anxiety-ridden mind. John looks down at his plate and then up again.

‘Which fork do I use?’ he whispers.

‘This one.’ Christopher holds up his fork for him.

‘Right.’ John locates the same utensil and puts the meat in his mouth and stops short. Christopher looks like he’s suppressing his laughter with equal parts amusement and fondness as John’s eyes go wide.

‘This is _good_ ,’ John says, genuinely surprised.

‘Didn’t encounter much of that during your travels, did you?’ Christopher’s still smiling. John Harrison also had a gap year.

‘My cuisine experience is more of the street vendor variety. Oh wow, I didn’t know things could _taste_ like that.’

Christopher chuckles. ‘Enjoy. And slow down a bit, we’ve got another eight courses to get through.’ John almost chokes on his mouthful, which means, yeah, he should slow down a bit.

They go through another three varieties of meat, six varieties of wine and three desserts, one of which he puts in his mouth without being prepared for the vibrantly numbing burning sensation, that he then frantically tries to douse with the remains of his wine, to which Christopher drops his head into his right arm to smother his giggling. When the rest of the restaurant is no longer judgementally eyeing them, Christopher hisses at him, ‘Did you not see that contains Sichuan peppers?’

‘I lost count of the courses!’ John protests raspily. When Christopher offers him a spoon of exotic chocolate cream from the tiramisu, John pauses a moment, then takes the mouthful instead of the spoon. They both blush at that.

When it comes time to pay, Christopher stops John scrambling for his wallet. ‘I’m paying. We agreed, remember? This half of the evening is mine.’

‘That’s not what I meant when we discussed that.’

‘Maybe you should have clarified the terms for the chap who went to Oxford law school.’

John glares at him, but is just relieved that he won’t have to explain this kind of expense to the Section 31 budget committee.

‘So where are we going next?’ Christopher asks casually as the waiter leaves with his card.

It’s John’s turn to play up the mystery. ‘Well, you know, I could tell you, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.’

Christopher’s willing to play. ‘Can you give me a hint, then?’

‘Only that I’ll be doing the driving for the rest of the evening.’

‘Should I be worried about that?’

John thinks of Rachel’s comments on the topic and replies smoothly, ‘Not at all.’

‘Very well.’ Christopher takes his card back from the waiter, thanks the man, and then stands up, offering his arm to John. ‘Shall we?’

John doesn’t know why that makes him smile wider at Christopher. ‘With pleasure, Christopher.’

‘Chris,’ Christopher corrects him, simply and meaningfully. John pauses.

‘With pleasure, Chris.’

*

‘Now you know this is only because of the hour—’

‘Hm?’ John turns to Christoph– Chris from the driver’s seat.

‘But is it necessary to go _quite_ that fast?’

John self-consciously eases up on the accelerator. ‘I just want to get there as soon as possible.’

‘I know, and so do I, but you did cut that last corner a little too close for comfort.’

‘Oh don’t worry, we’ll get out of the city soon, there’s not as many other cars there.’

‘Right.’ Chris ceases voicing his doubts and decides to keep an extra eye on the road instead. John eases up on the accelerator some more.

‘Better?’

‘Better.’ Christ gives him an agreeable smile that doesn’t belie his only slightly assuaged worries. John can see this, but he’s not inclined to modify his habits even further. He thinks, _maybe Rachel had a point_ , but then banishes the thought because his driving is perfectly safe, isn’t it?

Christ answers that question when they get to a stretch of country road and he suddenly screams, ‘SHEEP!’

John swerves hard to his right and then swerves equally hard back to avoid sacrificing Chris’s car to a lamppost, with them inside. ‘What the hell?!’

Chris peers out the back of the car onto the road. ‘I _think_ that was a sheep,’ he shakily explains. ‘I saw something big and white on the road and the first thing that came to mind was –’

‘Sheep,’ John answers for him, and then stares at him, and Chris stares back, and then they both cascade into hysterical laughter.

‘Maybe it was a _ghost_ ,’ Chris forces out between pants, prompting a renewed fit of giggles from John. Chris then loosens his bowtie, and John’s laughter dies in his throat, which Chris doesn’t notice, shoulders still shaking with spasms. For the rest of the drive the car is filled with companionable silence.

‘Do they even _have_ sheep in London?’ Chris asks, out of the blue, and they start chuckling again.

‘We’re here,’ John says, slowing to a stop, having arrived at what appears to be exactly the middle of Nowhere just this side of Too-Dark-To-See.

‘ _Where_ is _here_?’ Chris asks, stepping out.

‘Westerham Heights,’ John says, in a tone of voice that says Chris should be much more impressed than he is at the flat field they have found themselves it. ‘Highest point in Greater London.’

‘Not much to see, is there?’ Chris looks around, hand on his hips.

‘That’s why you look up instead,’ John smiles knowingly.

Chris does as told and simply says, ‘ _Ah_ ,’ and John lets him meditate with his head tilted back and his jaw hanging slightly open while he goes into the backseat and takes out the picnic mat he packed.

‘Come on.’ John takes the mat out into the field and lays it on the ground, not needing to turn around to check if Chris is following.

‘It _is_ beautiful,’ Chris breathes, eyes glued to the sky.

‘I know,’ John smiles. ‘Sit down.’

It’s only then that Chris realises the purpose of the mat. ‘That’s considerate of you.’

‘It wasn’t for you, it was for me. Unlike some people, I can’t afford to destroy my most expensive suit on a picnic.’

Chris doesn’t bother to grace that with a comeback in favour of stretching out on the mat and resting his head on his crossed arms. ‘Well worth a drive, I have to say.’

‘I know.’ John joins him, and they let the silence of the spheres submerge them.

‘I loved the concept of constellations,’ John says, hushed. ‘I liked the idea that no matter where you were, you could always look up and find something familiar, like an old friend.’

‘Like when you were travelling?’ Chris asks, also hushed.

John takes a moment to think of nights when he was in foreign countries and couldn’t sleep and he’d look up at the sky and tell himself Rachel could see the same stars. It was completely erroneous but in the imaginary safety blanket of the night, it made him feel better and that’s all that mattered. ‘Yeah.’ He looks over to Chris, who’s looking back at him, and then Chris moves to his side and lowers his head over John’s.

*

‘And then what happened?’

‘We stayed there for a while and then I drove us back.’

‘What, that’s it? Nothing _else_ happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘God, you’re such a _bore_ ,’ Rachel sighed, rolling her eyes, finally leaving John in peace to change out of his restrictive dinner jacket and do something about the suspicious grass stains on the inside.

‘Had any luck?’ John asks her, to distract her from looking over and noticing the grass stains.

‘No, I barely even know what to look for. They should’ve sent someone better.’

‘Nobody’s going to be better than you.’ John knows this is what the case agents think. They briefed him as such.

‘I hope so,’ Rachel is pensive, poring over information on her PADD.

‘Do you need help?’

‘No.’ Rachel reads some more. ‘Actually, yeah. How do you get into locked-up places?’

‘Well, that depends on your cover story.’

‘My cover is that I’m an aspiring writer trying to do _Ulysses_ in London instead of Dublin.’

John blinks at her. ‘Why?’

‘Because the idea is so preposterous that I couldn’t have made it up. And if I have time, I will.’

John doesn’t tell her that she won’t have time. Instead, he says, ‘I’d say just proceed as normal and give that story when asked. If they ask you why you’re doing it at night, play up the eccentric student writer. You look young enough that it shouldn’t get you into too much trouble, but don’t make them think you’re underage, either.’

Rachel dutifully notes down each point on her PADD. ‘Got it.’

‘Good. Also, erase that.’

‘Hm?’

‘If that gets hacked, those notes will arouse suspicion.’

‘But how am I supposed to remember?’

‘You’ll remember. Erase them.’ Rachel reluctantly obeys, then looks back up at him, then catches sight of the green smudges on the inside of John’s dinner jacket.

‘Hey, what’s that?’ she asks, pointing, and John beats a hasty retreat.

*

Chris opened the door to the darkened office. ‘Hey, love, what’re you doing this late?’

John looks up from under the light shadow of his lone desklamp. ‘Oh, hey. Well, I’m the new one, so all the chains of delegation end up with me, I guess. I could ask you the same.’

‘I had to get some stuff done before Monday. To be specific, I had to get stuff to be done on Monday done today.’

‘Oh yeah, bank holiday. Shit, I was hoping these could wait till then, I guess not.’

Chris walks up to his desk with an air of sympathy. ‘How long is that going to take?’

‘God, I don’t know. Probably _until_ Monday. Why?’

Chris looks into the corner of the ceiling and quirks his mouth and looks like he’s trying to come up with a scheme. John puts his papers down and smiles at him expectantly.

‘Take it home and do it at a sane hour, then bring it back and file it.’

‘Alright. And how do you propose I get in? Through the fire escape?’

‘I can let you in.’

‘You won’t be here.’

‘I will if I drive you here.’

‘Oh, god, don’t, it’s out of the way for you.’

‘Not if I’m driving from my house.’

John is now befuddled. ‘That’s what I meant.’

‘That’s not what _I_ meant,’ Chris replies, unenlighteningly. John continues furrowing his brows in confusion at him until he caves and says, earnestly, ‘Come home with me.’

John’s face clears and a smile slowly takes over. He puts his stylus down and stands up to kiss Chris over the table, which Chris returns tenderly. Then John starts packing up and Chris adds, ‘But I’m driving.’

John is quite happy to acquiesce, since he doesn’t have anything to stop him falling asleep at the wheel, which would be very messy. When they get in the car, Chris pulls out some coffee-flavoured chewing gum and puts it in his mouth, then offers John some, to which John says, ‘Bit late for caffeine if you wanted to sleep tonight.’

‘Well, it doesn’t actually have any caffeine, but the chewing keeps you awake.’

John thinks, _Good trick that_ , and then doesn’t think any more until the car pulls to a stop and Chris pats his shoulder gently to wake him up. They make the short walk to Chris’s front door with their shoulders brushing and their lips mute with exhaustion. John can tell from the subtle sagging in Chris’s normally ramrod posture that he’s exhausted after the pre-holiday rush, too.

John was expecting Chris to take him home eventually, but under slightly different circumstances. For one, he expected to be less tired than now. To be fair, John’s handled exhaustion far too many times to count, but he’s never allowed himself to feel it until he was safely ensconced in bed. But he’s safe here, with Chris, and now he gets the impression that someone’s drained his blood sugar down to its limit and a fat, sprawling cat of aching has taken up residence across his shoulders. However well trained he is, a human body is still a human body and needs its downtime. Hence, by mutual unspoken agreement, they each only complete the bare minimum of their nightly routines before collapsing into both sides of Chris’s queen-sized high-thread-count bed and falling unconscious, with John just managing to fit one more half-asleep kiss in to thank Chris for getting an extra toothbrush out.

For another, John was hoping to get a better look around Chris’s townhouse than while being jerked awake by the buzzing of his phone at, according to the clock display, 0349 at night.

‘Hello?’ John mumbles into the mouthpiece, vision clouded by equal parts sleep and darkness. Chris stirs beside him with a muffled groan, and John feels bad for waking him.

‘Is this John Harrison?’

‘Yes.’ The tone of voice makes John wake up several degrees instantly.

‘This is Newham General Hospital, your sister is in emergency care, she was caught in an explosion.’

John can’t feel the rest of his body.

*

Rachel is late. John paces in the corridor mirroring the motion of the single thought predominating amidst an underlying cacophony of panic in his head. _She’s late. She’s late._ It makes no sense because emergency surgery doesn’t operate on schedules or deadlines. Accidents have no concern for the decency of the hour or the whims of quotidian life. Chris is staring at him and when he makes eye contact in passing he feels like he needs to tell Chris that _it isn’t logical_ , but he isn’t entirely sure what he’s referring to. There are bees in his head, only they’re not bees, they’re a crowd of people shouting continuously; John wonders who they are, but he’s too far away to distinguish them; John wants to ignore them, but they’re too close to shut out. One of them is right next to him, muttering low and worried, _she’s late, she’s late_.

_Why is she late? Why is she late?_

Something brushes his arm and his irritation spikes and he slings it off his arm violently. Chris retracts his hand with wide-eyed worry on his face. ‘Who’s late, love?’

‘What?’

‘Who’s late, why are they late?’

‘Was I saying that out loud?’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘I dunno, I meant, she’s late, she’s supposed to be out already, isn’t she, I mean, how bad is it, that she’s still in there, I’m not making sense, sorry.’ John means he’s sorry for reacting to Chris’s touch but he doesn’t have time to clarify. If he talks any more he’ll probably fuck it up even worse and then he’ll have to explain everything on top of that and he just doesn’t. have. time.

John isn’t entirely certain what he needs time for. Time to think. Time to calm down, time to shut up the buzzing in his head, time to find Rachel, time to fix her. Time with her.

_Don’t go there. She’s not dead yet. She needs you now, and she’s not dead yet._

John is going circles in his head, trying to find a way out.

*

Chris is trying to help. He worries about crossing the line, then decides the lines can all go fuck themselves if it means bringing John’s sister back. He reaches out a hand and grabs John’s lower arm hard. John stops abruptly and stares at him like he jostled him on the Tube, only slightly less fiercely.

‘Sit down,’ Chris coaxes him, and John complies by collapsing onto the bench like a toppled Jenga tower and then instantly reconstitutes himself into a slumped, buzzing _Le Penseur **[1]**_.

Chris tries to help by putting an arm around John. John drops his face into his hands. Chris rubs soothing circles into his leg and hums old lullabies into his hair and feels, gradually, incrementally, his heaving shoulders slow down from their frenetic almost-hyperventilating pace. He doesn’t know how long it takes. Time isn’t important.

The door opens.

*

The door opens. That is important.

The operating theatre doors clatter open to spit out a turquoise-suited ~~blood-spattered~~ surgeon whose shoulders slump with exhaustion and—

‘She’s stable but still critical. We’re going to keep her in intensive care and continue observing her. You can sit with her a while but we’ve got nurses monitoring all stations so you don’t have to worry.’

Misread, then. Just exhaustion, not disappointment, sorrow, grief, despair, resignation—

 _Dangerous. Your observations have been slipping up, lately._ John recovers enough to breathe out a ‘Thank you, doctor’ and collapse onto the bench again. The surgeon nods sympathetically at Chris and leaves. John doesn’t look up as a nurse comes up and gives Chris Rachel’s ward number. Chris hesitates as the nurse leaves before tentatively putting a hand on John’s shoulder.

‘John, she’s in—’

‘Ward 139, I know.’

‘Okay. Shall we go, or do you want to sit here a while?’

John responds by grabbing Chris’s arm and using it to haul himself upright.

Chris holds on to his arm all the way up. John is inwardly grateful for that, because he feels like without Chris’s hand holding him down, he’s going to white out. He makes a mental note to thank him later.

He forgets that mental note when he walks into the room and sees Rachel lying still, multiply intubated, and tiny in the ridiculously large beeping bed.

*

Chris directs John to a chair but at least he isn’t collapsing into things anymore. He’s gone from the Jenga to the sleepwalking stage, and Chris takes the opportunity to pour a cup of water from the pitcher on the tiny table. He offers John some and John takes the cup, mechanically drains it, and returns it all without speaking or taking his eyes from the girl on the bed.

Chris thinks she looks very small and young, and can understand why John is so worried for her.

The nurse finishes rustling over the myriad monitors and life support devices and whispers to Chris how to find him at the nurses’ station down the hall before leaving. Chris thanks him for that. John doesn’t.

This room has a clock in it. It indicates that it is now past noon, although the windows have been darkened and the lights turned low. As it ticks on and counts down the adrenaline wearing off, Chris has to fight to keep his eyelids open. Just as he’s dozing off, John suddenly bolts up from the chair and marches out of the room, abruptly jerking Chris awake.

*

John doesn’t know what’s happening except that he needs to _get out_.

His eyes are burning and when he rubs at them his fingers come away wet.

He can’t control his breathing. He thinks this fits the symptoms of a panic attack, which is odd, because he’s never had a panic attack in his life.

He isn’t entirely sure that his legs are listening to him, but since he doesn’t know what to do and his legs seem to be doing pretty well deciding where he should be, he doesn’t question them.

His hands, however, need reminding that he needs to push open doors before he walks facefirst into them.

He’s in the washroom. That’s fine. He just needs to wash his face and calm down, that’s all. But apparently his brain is so disinclined at the moment to view his reflection that it steers him away from the taps, into a cubicle. He shuts the door and tries to breathe, leaning his head back against the cubicle wall. They’re in a hospital, so it’s reasonably clean.

Footsteps. Voice. Swish of door hinge. ‘John, are you alright?’

John doesn’t give any sign of his location as Chris concernedly calls his name while checking every cubicle. He doesn’t have the energy. Chris will get to the far one eventually.

When Chris finds him he joins him in the cubicle and closes the door behind him. Just as he opens his mouth to ask after him John grabs his jacket sleeves with both hands and slams their lips together. He doesn’t know why, but Chris is his boyfriend and from what he knows, that means he doesn’t need a reason. He’s desperate, almost violent, as if Chris could give him the breath of life itself, or at least the breath of please-tell-me-what-the-hell-is-happening. Chris tastes like a nicotine hit, soothing his terrifyingly frayed nerves, John needs to get enough of him so the muffled cacophony can leave as soon as possible, and Chris is pulling him in with his mouth, stroking his back with his hands, regulating his breathing so John can match him and calm, calm. It works, but not fast enough.

When John frees Chris’s mouth to suckle at his jawline, Chris runs his hand through the mussy hair at the side of his head and chants, ‘Easy, easy, easy.’ John looks up at him for one breathless moment, his clear eyes made clearer by the white LED lights and the tears, unconsciously pleading for Chris to make it okay. Chris decides, gropes the door locked, then bodily pushes John off the door into the neighbouring wall, and takes over kissing while John’s hands slip down and start fumbling at his trousers.

He works them both together, grinding into John’s hips and licking at John’s upper palate like stroking a cat, while John sucks at his lower lip like a nursing child, taking his turn to run his hands through Chris’s curls, rub at Chris’s shoulders under his jacket, touching him as much as he could. His hands don’t stop moving until he has to break off their kissing to breathe and gasp out his release. Chris gives a strangled, open-mouthed cry soon after and falls against him, and John buries his face into Chris’s collar and forgets about the world beyond the warm body holding him safe.

 

[1] ed.: More commonly known as The Thinker, sculpture by Auguste Rodin.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am sorry this took so long but I had to get font colours working...
> 
> blue clue of the day: pay attention to the names!

‘You can’t do this.’

‘Those are your orders, Doctor Cooper.’

‘I won’t do it.’

‘If that is so, Doctor Cooper, then we will simply record that you were uncooperative and enlist the services of another doctor.’

‘You can’t do this. You’ll kill her!’

‘The surgery poses no such dangers as determined by the medical committee.’

‘Not to a _healthy_ patient, no. She’s recovering from severe bodily trauma and second-degree burns all over her body, I wouldn’t recommend it even for a purebred subject, much less her. She’s just a little girl, for god’s sake, let her heal first at least.’

‘This is the single best opportunity we have of carrying it out without arousing her suspicions, which would cause severe psychological distress.’

‘If you cared _at all_ about her welfare you wouldn’t be proposing that we conduct _experimental deep-brain surgery_ on a patient who’s just _barely_ survived been _blown up! Nobody_ can survive that kind of trauma, we don’t even _know_ for sure that cutting into her thalamus will improve any mental abilities she has. And we _don’t_ know if improving it is going to _help_ her.’

‘That is _not_ your concern, Doctor Cooper. Your concern should be with the programme rather than the subjects. I have tolerated your opposition for this long purely because of the senior position you hold, and I’ve no doubt that I don’t need to reiterate what the _real_ stakes are. However if you should persist in this obstinate line of defiance much longer I shall be forced to penalise you and command someone else to your position.’

‘…’

‘Perhaps you should think it over.’

*

it

wont

die

it

just

wont

die

Rachel reaches for more but fails.

*

It’s Chris’s turn to endure moving day with John, but he doesn’t seem afraid, and at least John isn’t driving. They’ve rented a pickup to move John’s stuff from his apartment, of which around 46% are Rachel’s, of which 35% is food in the form of snacks that are basically condensed calories, and 29% are collections of trinkets and junk, or as she called it ‘evidence’, that she picked up going around the city. The snacks have been donated after Rachel completely lost interest in food, but John can’t bring himself to junk the junk, and Chris doesn’t press him to. Chris couldn’t possibly expect to place conditions like that, when he was the one who suggested for John to move in, so they could take turns looking after Rachel. John is inwardly and outwardly grateful for this gesture.

Newham General Hospital is overstretched and understaffed, because some things about healthcare do not change. Hence, Rachel’s doctor was willing to check her out much earlier than most patients, in light of the supportive environment she had at home and the almost miraculous recovery she’d made since the accident.

Rachel is technically fine. There’s not so much as a sprained ligament wrong with her, she recovered perfectly well, and better than some people who haven’t had two major surgeries after a massive traumatic event, including a deep-brain operation to relieve pressure in her skull while she was still in a coma. She dresses, she washes, she sleeps, like a perfectly tuned marionette of the ideal citizen. If she could shop, governments everywhere would be trying to find ways to replace the population with clones of her.

 _Stop getting distracted._ John forces himself to put the archaic pressed copper Disneyland medallion Rachel dug out of god-knows-where back into the box, to carry up the townhouse stairs.

No, none of that is a problem, in fact, it makes the problem much easier to deal with, if not to comprehend. The problem is that Rachel hasn’t spoken to anyone since she woke up, like the world has suddenly been filled with strangers, but even to strangers, and depending on one’s preference, especially to strangers one tries to communicate, and Rachel hasn’t so much as winked communicatively at a moth. She doesn’t even recognise ~~John~~

 _Stop worrying._ She will, John is certain, because it can’t be otherwise. Anyway, it’s too early to say. Chris is hoping she’ll recover fully in time. John isn’t sure what to think.

He’s debating how many densely packed boxes Chris’s antique IKEA shelves can take without collapsing, when Chris’s work phone starts ringing. John knows that happens a lot, and John knows how to discern the tone that means ‘sky is falling, again’ through a ceiling and a floor.

As expected, Chris appears at the door. ‘Hey, love, I’ve got to go back out to the office, you can just put your stuff anywhere and we’ll fix it up when I get back, yeah?’

‘It’s alright, I’ll try to get a headstart on that,’ John calls back. Chris shoots him a quick smile and a quirk of his eternally pensive eyebrows, and disappears down the narrow stairs. John waits for the sound of his car to fade down the street before abandoning the boxes and going up to the study.

*

**tick, tick, tick**

John is counting the lovingly crafted volumes in Chris’s study. John’s computer is counting all the archived folders in Chris’s secure backup drive. John’s programme is looking for any files that might be connected to the deeply entrenched mole in Parliament suspected of leaking highly classified information to Brazilian intelligence.

John’s eye is caught by the slim gold letters on the wave-patterned spine of a fat, shiny black book cover proclaiming itself _Moby Dick_. He remembers every photographic, word-filled page of the story, but he’s long since lost ~~James’s~~ original copy, and while he never fails to tease Chris about his useless, un-digitised collection, he’s actually envious of the luxury of leisure time implied by every beautiful volume of Chris’s gorgeous, lush library. Time to relax, breathe, admire, inhabit, and escape.

Well, he’s got time now. Johns slides the thick, weighty volume out with a whisper of friction, as if he’d pulled it from the depths of ghostly history, and brings it over to the table to peruse. As he’s sitting down, he happens to glance at the monitor of the main computer to check on progress, and spots the appearance of one Jean Gregg.

Jean Gregg was a case agent of his.

Putting the book aside for later, John traces Jean Gregg. He reads through her university GPA, her three siblings, her surviving grandparents, her deceased grandparents, her CIA-analyst mother, and her new parakeet, before he gets to her case files. The latest files are labelled with names he knows well, including a few Johns, and they are all sealed. John hesitates only a few seconds before using Holmes’s credentials to unseal the files.

The access logs indicate that Chris has never opened the files, which is a small measure of relief against John’s tightly controlled nervousness. It’s a given that people of Chris’s position have access to far more information than they need or want to do their job, and it’s the job of the clerks, such as John Harrison, to provide relevant briefs when needed. In file manager mode, John can’t see the attached images, but he hopes very hard and very irrationally that they don’t have his face in them. He flips through paragraph after paragraph of clinically detached descriptions of missions where he’d fought, burned and killed on command. When the other computer pings, he doesn’t hear it.

He is rudely kicked out of his immersive concentration when he almost half-consciously hits a link, like the million other links he’s clicked before now, and is slapped in the face with an ‘ACCESS DENIED’ notice.

Because of the state of mind he’s in, John is momentarily dumbfounded, then attempts to use Holmes’s credentials again, and only when the notice remains unmoved does he return to himself enough to begin working around the security measures. It’s involved and tedious, much like government itself, but John feels like he can’t look away, and when the notice finally clears he thanks one Sansar Narantsetseg fervently in his heart.

John sees names: Cooper, Hanson, Tomke, Gregor; Timothy, Leonard, Belinda, Kate. He sees his name, John, and eventually he starts seeing another one, Indian or something, Khan. He sees words like genetic, proteomic, splicing, sampling, cloning. He sees engineering, training, performance, expectations, and all the different ways people say ‘kill’ without saying it. When he opens the file called ‘Original Samples’, he sees augmentation, and CIA, and escape, and hideout, and Hindu Kush, and code-name _Botany Bay_ , and ‘official report of insurgents’.

John reads on, and the clock on the wall ticks the hours away.

*

He’s staring at the monitor, but he’s not reading anymore; the words are swimming before his eyes, as if he’s floating in the documents he’s just finished absorbing, trying to keep his head above water, silently paddling and slowly sinking, very much like the time he almost drowned off Sumatra, with less panic response and therefore more deadly.

Because his brain is busy trying to process all the new information, he doesn’t know how much time passes. By the time his eyes focus again, the computer has automatically exited from the sensitive files to the marginally less sensitive menu, and the light is getting low outside.

John jumps up and goes to check the landline machine to make sure he didn’t miss Chris’s call. Chris, being the lovely, considerate, polite chap he was raised to be, calls John when he’s heading home for Parliament, conveniently giving John plenty of notice to hide any of his spying activities. Chris hasn’t called, but John starts packing up his computer to analyse the transferred files at his leisure, instead of leaving it suspiciously hooked up to Chris’s storage drive. John goes downstairs, puts his computer in its usual place, and then goes back up to clear Chris’s computer, and then spots another entry in the folder he opened earlier. He had somehow overlooked a small file simply titled ‘Executive Order’ from the most recent backup. It’s too small to be very long, so he opens it.

1 minute and 46 seconds later, John has read the document 3 times, once mouthing the words slowly. He proceeds to wipe Chris’s computer, grab his coat and run out the door, ignoring the dull clatter behind him.

5 minutes and 23 seconds later, the landline starts ringing. On the floor, a black gold-accented book lies unhearing where it has ignominiously fallen.

*

killer ha ha ha ha good one you should tell that to the gift wrappers I know I’m going down there now check up on old morrison his family’s collecting the body tomorrow off you go then and now the news I’ve brought you dinner mrs hereford hello ms hereford hello nurse whatsit say on the tag on yes radley hello nurse radley thank you so much no problem at all ma’am I’ll be in the nurses’ station yes thank you very much look mother here’s dinner remember when you made my favourite macaroni soup remember when I used to make you soup my little girl all grown up remember how janice did it turn this off unplug this roll this up cap this and out the door OH good heavens almost ran me over how rude not the smile though that’s not rude I’m so sorry can I help you sir as you should know visiting hours are over oh no I’m just here to pick up my sister is she being checked out yes that’s right by me at least yes of course 139 is being checked out rachel rachel rachel hey rachel it’s me she’s looking at me or through me one of them at least she’s looking we’re going home now for a given value of home as long as I’ve got her it’ll be okay I thought 139 was being checked out tomorrow well what does it matter the girl’s fine former head of starfleet intelligence elias haffley has announced his bid for senate she’s not fine she’s silent as a dead man on the operating table I brought your clothes, do you want to change there see she’s fine she’s moving she’s like a puppet it creeps me out anyway you won’t have to worry about it much longer eva could you go give emeritt in 152 his psuedonitroglycerin please it’s not my fault I’m the newest here and however much they’ve seen they haven’t seen people move like that and be fine welcome to the tonight show god there’s nothing good on these hospital channels claire was right I should have brought a book eva’s right though that shouldn’t be healthy oh who are we to say doctor cameron said she could go home I could see her face though she doesn’t understand it even after they called in a neurologist they couldn’t understand it why’s she taking so long the sooner we get out the safer we are rachel are you alright in there rach oh fuck gave me a fright bloody door are you ready, let’s go now I feel like I’m leading a robot dog aren’t they sweet she’s holding her brother’s hand mr harrison before you go we need to arrange a follow-up with you oh yes I’ve already fixed a date next week with doctor cameron over the phone because I’m quite busy and couldn’t meet up with him alright then good evening sir good evening to you too charming fellow isn’t he god bryce you’re attached all the same god being bedridden is such a pain it’s so nice being in here finally have some time to myself only good thing about hospitals is the morphine wonder what the kids are eating at home 184 is vegetarian 127 is ovopescolactarian elevator not stairs otherwise you just look paranoid there’s dinner at home if you’re hungry we can stop somewhere to eat after we switch vehicles I’ve brought all of your stuff over I’m sorry you’ll never see them again you should see chris’s books, he’s a book hoarder you really should see them they’re full of things they never told you about things they never let you know I can read them to you the classics, like Moby Dick, it used to be my favourite I can’t get sick now I can’t am I getting sick oh no I’m just crying which is probably worse we’re trying to prepare for the midterm elections at the moment and priority one is fixing the coffee machine ha ha ha you’ll never know what that’s like when a coffee machine is the worst thing that could happen and all you need when you’re down is pizza and not a swiss army knife and a semi-automatic and you can read to your heart’s content about places which are not here instead of all the ways to stop someone’s heart you won’t and I can’t teach you but they will not take you away from me they will not you need to tell me if you’re feeling sick or anything, okay, I’m going to take care of you now can you hear me in there alright let’s go chin up eyes straight anybody want anything from the café before it closes some cheesecake please cherry soda for me and you dana this is clearly not the clinic entrance I’m quite lost have to call toby are you doing it too that’s my girl god I’m always dead on my feet after a shift don’t collapse on the tube mate or I'll have to emt you reminds me of a joke you know what they say about this job they say it’s


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> slightly shorter chapter. final chapter to be up a little earlier than usual.  
> blue clue of the day: try sounding out the word.  
> (honestly, I have no guarantees that the obscure clues my absurdly baroque writing leaves actually work. I'm terribly sorry if they don't!)

Northolt, formerly an RAF station, located in Ruislip, Greater London, 6 miles north of the historic Heathrow Shuttle Station, formerly known as Heathrow Airport, is a minor transit and holding station for high-clearance military personnel and maintains a functional runway and barracks. For the past 3 years it has been the living quarters of Section 31 special operatives when in-between assignments. Given the extreme nature of their training and experiences, it was determined that a healthier body of operatives could be maintained by encouraging them to socialise amongst themselves rather than risking exposure amongst the general population. In the interests of maintaining compliance in the operatives, the area is self-policed to avoid any appearance of imprisonment or restraint. Previous surveys found no indication of dissent or volatility in these living arrangements.

Reviews of security footage from the Greater London network determined that at 2249 hours, a foreign vehicle entered the compound and was not stopped. It was driving quickly and upon stopping outside the barracks a man in a black jacket exited the driver’s side, went around the front of the vehicle, opened the door on the passenger side, and led out a young girl in a sundress. The man then locked the car and led the girl inside. The man was later identified as operative John and operative Rachel who were on assignment, according to information provided to Operation Clean Slate by Section 31. It is unclear why they made their way to Northolt. Due to the time-sensitive nature of Operation Clean Slate, the presence of operatives John and Rachel were not accounted for.

Clean Slate arrived at Northolt at 0002 hours and proceeded to cut power to the barracks before breaching it. In order to minimise disturbance, a small squad was sent in to use the element of surprise and superior firepower to eliminate the subjects. After the last squad member entered, the door was observed to shut, against normal operating procedure, and the squad went into radio silence. At 0038 hours, the squad commander radioed a failed mission with unknown number of casualties and a backup team was sent for. Given that the element of surprise was gone, the backup squad was bigger and additionally armed with submachine guns, assault rifles, and flash-bang and tear gas grenades. The unfavourable location of Northolt barracks meant that the second squad had to approach from an open field, which they were initially hesitant to do. Eventually, it was determined to approach from the nearest building, the equipment shed, and they took up position while the rest of the commanding personnel withdrew to outside firing range. Just as they did so, the equipment shed exploded and killed most of the backup squad instantly. At this point, commanding personnel came under fire from long-range hunting rounds and suffered casualties. The subjects also violated article 25 of chapter IV of the 39th Geneva Convention by firing liberally on the attendant medical personnel. At this point, General [redacted] ordered a retreat.

At 0255 hours it was decided to attempt to negotiate with the subjects for a peaceful surrender. The landline had been cut previously to isolate the subjects but at this point it was reconnected and a call was put through. The line rang for 4m03s before it was picked up and a voice later identified as belonging to operative John answered, where during conversation with General [redacted] subject John revealed full knowledge of the intentions of Operation Clean Slate. Subject John also threatened to use a digital dead-man’s switch which when triggered would leak the documents of Section 31 and Operation Clean Slate to the public internet.[1] Presumably, subject John’s goal was to garner the cooperation of the General with the underlying assumption that the lives of the subjects were not a priority. The General requested some time to communicate with his superiors and closed the connection. It is curious to note in hindsight that the subjects did not request objects other siege instigators have in the past, such as medical supplies, or food and water.

At 0510 hours the connection was reopened to communicate to the subjects that negotiations were viable. Subject John then made the demand for a pilot to fly them out of Northolt to the Hebrides using one of the planes on the base. It was determined that a pilot would be found and the plane allowed to take off so anti-aircraft guns could cripple the plane and allow the subjects to be captured. Accordingly, a military pilot uninformed of the full parameters of the mission was sent for, and anti-aircraft weapons were moved into position along the flightpath.

At 0544 hours, a commotion was observed from the barracks, but it died down quickly.

At 0609 hours, the man later positively identified as subject John appeared close to the command tent, carrying the catatonic girl identified as subject Rachel, who had her arms slashed open lengthwise. Subject John requested medical help for the girl in exchange for turning himself in, but because of the blood from subject Rachel’s wounds, sniffer dogs traced their route to a trapdoor in the ground on the other side of the base that led through a tunnel right into the barracks. When armed forces were sent down the tunnel, they ran into the subjects who were presumably about to exit through the tunnel and escape into the countryside. All of the subjects were subdued. When subject John heard the other subjects’ calls for help, he became hysterical, screaming ‘You vermin!’ at the guards, and was only subdued after much effort. Subject Rachel’s wounds were determined to be self-inflicted. The subject also continuously mouthed a repeated word which, through lip-reading software, was determined to be ‘wondai’.

Evidence from the aftermath indicates that the pilot was a distraction who would have been forced to fly an empty plane out of the airfield while most of the subjects escaped through the tunnel previously described. The tunnel has indications of use that show it was not dug at the last minute and was in fact previously prepared and used for secret entrance and exit to the barracks.

-

The subjects shall be enclosed within the empty Botany Bay cryotubes and all records of the programme are to be expunged.

*

**click. beep beep beep**

‘Won’t they get hurt from the process?’

‘Not at all. They’ve got antifreeze genes, among some other things we’ve added. We accounted for that when Batch 0 failed.’

‘Yeah, I heard about that. That was so long ago. … What happened?’

‘That’s classified.’

‘Okay.’

‘… You mustn’t tell anyone, do you hear? _Anyone._ Not your colleagues, not your family, not your dog. Unless you want to end up in one of those too. The General will put you in himself if that’s what it took.’

‘O-okay.’

‘… Alright.

‘If I remember correctly, we retrieved eighty-seven tubes, but by the time we got to them twelve had failed. We had to reverse-engineer two of the remaining before we could figure out how to safely awaken the rest. When the thawing sequence went according to plan we thought we’d got it.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘We didn’t. We decided to open all of them and that was our worst mistake. 80% of them bled out internally and suffered systemic organ failure. Of the remaining two-thirds of them suffered total brain death. Fourteen of them required life support immediately and still died from lethal tissue degradation.’

‘… Was there anyone left?’

‘Yes, just one, the youngest. That might be why she made it that far. When she woke up she was hysterical and when we tried to hold her down her skin started peeling off like a banana.’

‘Oh god…’

‘That’s still survivable, so we tried to tranquillise her, which needless to say wasn’t easy. We had to inject directly into her jugular but when she went under…’

‘She went _under_.’

‘Yes. So now we had seventy-three dead samples on our hands. We were just standing around staring numbly at each other when Dr Gorsky suddenly grabbed a hypo and started jabbing at the poor girl’s arms. He said “get the blood, the blood is still alive!” … Yeah, I know. But we did it. We also had skin and hair samples and tried to work from there, and you know the rest.’

‘I guess so. What batch was this one?’

‘We did so many that I lost count… we kept losing them and losing them and I tell you when I first saw that blastocyst anchor on the tissue wall I thought I was dreaming.’

‘I hope they sleep tight. That’s a lot of years of work down there. Where are you going to go, Doctor Ann?’

‘… I don't know, Johanna. Start over, maybe. I’m going to start over.’ 

[1] The actual existence of such a switch, the implied leak and its implications are still under investigation.


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> blue clue: pay attention to the dates

‘Today is stardate 2246.091[1]. My name is Ann Cooper. My work… is finished.’

 **beep.** ‘ _Log sealed._ ’

*

He comes to with the taste of blood in his mouth.

It’s a while before his limbs regain feeling and stop stinging his nerves with cold. In the meantime he tries to breathe as slowly and deeply as possible. He has no idea where he is but he’s perfectly ready to bide and find out in due time. When he can move his eyelids he opens them slowly, allowing his pupils to adjust to the light. That takes longer than he expects.

There is light, and movement. When he can focus he sees that they are doctors and soldiers running about. No, not soldiers. Dress uniforms; officers. Their mouths move too, but he’s lying stiff and still in a black coffin a world away, wondering if they’re waking him up to bury him alive. Waiting for them to decide his fate.

He hates the feeling.

When they open the coffin he immediately pushes himself up, which startles some of them. Good. The uniforms refuse to be daunted, and one man who looks like his skin is pulled too tightly across his skull walks boldly up to him. He recognises the bravado for what it is. He will indulge it for now.

‘I have a proposal for you.’

Interesting.

*

A few hours later, after Alexander Marcus had laid out the terms of his ‘proposal’, and in the same breath threatened the lives of his family, and explained the ancient black coffins, and tried to coax him to speak for several hours, and given up, and placed him in a holding room shaped like an apartment, he pulls off his three-hundred-year-old clothes, textures gone strange with freeze-thawed blood, and steps under a scalding hot shower to try to return feeling to his extremities. It works sufficiently well, and he steps out of the shower slightly more ready to face the new world before him. He wraps a towel around his hips, wipes a patch off the fogged-up mirror and stares into the eyes of a stranger.

His family is at stake. He cannot fail. He will not.

_I will not fail._

_My name is Khan._

_‘_ My name is Khan.’

 

[1] ed.: I’m assuming since it looks like the first part of the date is years and the second part is days, the latter part should be in 3 digits rather than 2.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ... and it's over! feedback and suggestions welcome =D


End file.
